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4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019
Copyright © Tash Aw 2019
Cover design by Jack Smyth
Cover images © Shutterstock & Upsplash
Tash Aw asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Information on previously published material appears here.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008318543
Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008318567
Version: 2019-02-27
For Francis
‘Here we received the first blows: and it was so new and senseless that we felt no pain, neither in body nor in spirit. Only a profound amazement: how can one hit a man without anger?’
Primo Levi, If This is a Man
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
I. October
II. November
III. December
IV. January
About the Author
By the same Author
About the Publisher
October 2nd
You want me to talk about life, but all I’ve talked about is failure, as if they’re the same thing, or at least so closely entwined that I can’t separate the two – like the trees you see growing in the half-ruined buildings in the Old Town. Roots clinging to the outside of the walls, holding the bricks and stone and whatever remains of the paint together, branches pushing through holes in the roof. Sometimes there’s almost nothing left of the roof, if