Heaven Has Eyes: Stories

"Quietly disquieting, these stories shimmer with unsettling currents ... Philip Holden's prose, meditative and thoughtful, has a sharp bite to it."

-Jeremy Tiang, author of State of Emergency, winner of the Singapore Literature Prize

Set in Singapore, Vancouver, London, and the spaces in between, the short stories in Heaven Has Eyes offer an imaginative, penetrating look at the complexities of migration, belonging, and a desire to find a home in the world.

This updated edition, containing four new stories, is also charged with speculative daring, grappling with the entangled strands of forgotten or suppressed political histories. Pierre Trudeau and Lee Kuan Yew, later to become the prime ministers of Canada and Singapore respectively, converse as young men over beer in a smoky pub. An ageing politician yearns to reconcile the tough policy choices he made with the socialist ideals he championed in his youth. A young therapist in London tries to help a traumatized political exile from Singapore. Couples in transnational marriages struggle to make sense of where they belong-or where they want to belong-while venturing out to raucous political rallies, into abandoned mines, and on fraught plane journeys.

In tender, luminous writing, Philip Holden explores piercing psychological questions about what it is like to be haunted by one's past. Deeply moving and emotionally rich, the stories weave together love, loss, grief, miscommunication, forgetting, and remembering- pushing the boundaries of realism, making and unmaking our sense of home.