Shantih Shantih Shantih

--Recipient of the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize Readers’ Favourite English Book--

Snow falls over Singapore for exactly four minutes and twenty-six seconds, quietly interrupting the lives of a dozen individuals, lonely and adrift: an art student and a former fling, chancing upon one another at Punggol MRT station; two men awake at 4am, watching YouTube videos of hail falling over the island nation; a sugar baby trawling through Google Maps, exploring the homes and neighbourhoods of her former clients...

Witness the near-miraculous ways passers-by can transform the trajectories of one another’s lives.

Shantih Shantih Shantih is a heady mix of desire and dauntlessness that revels in its interconnections, pulling close a community that is at once together and apart.

“Dreamscape, portrait and meditation, Shantih Shantih Shantih is a distinctly Singaporean book that echoes the loneliness of living in a global city—together yet apart, intimate yet distant, aspirational yet melancholic.”
—Quarterly Literary Review Singapore

“An elegiac meditation on our desire for both individuality and interconnection… A remarkable feat for a work of fiction from a promising writer who will continue to do great things.”
—Balli Kaur Jaswal, Shirley Geok-lin Lim & Xu Xi, 2022 Singapore Literature Prize judges’ citation

“There is just no other local author who writes with Daryl’s emo-Piscean sense of awe and wonder, making him as queerly unique as a pirouetting flake of starry snow.”
—Cyril Wong