Email Hwee Hwee Tan at hwee_tan@hotmail,com

The Story

'We all have stories buried in our past ... these are our real stories, the stories only we know, the stories of our foreign bodies ...'

Mei, a beautiful young Singaporean lawyer, is woken by a call from her English boyfriend, Andy. It’s one in the morning and ‘I’m in jail’ are definitely not the kind of words that put a girl in a good mood. Working as a relief teacher, and in Singapore because of his best friend Eugene, Andy has been arrested for masterminding a multi-million dollar international soccer gambling syndicate. He swears he’s been framed, and this leaves Mei and Eugene, friends through childhood, only two weeks to prove his innocence.

Switching from East to West, from past to present and from one voice to another with incisive dexterity and wit, this stylish novel unravels three quite different stories - of abuse and betrayal; of murder and lies; and the search for a greater truth behind the lager sagas of Freshers and other twenty-nothings.

These diverse stories of expatriates, hungry ghosts and UEFA Cup matches collide in a startling fashion. Now the three friends have to confront their disturbing histories. Should they reveal their secrets to one another? Will the truth set Andy free, or will the unveiling of their past only serve to destroy their future?

A dazzling fusion of Western pop culture, Christian mysticism and Taoist rituals, Foreign Bodies is a brilliantly multi-layered and decidedly humorous debut.

Why I wrote Foreign Bodies

After collecting 203 rejection slips (everyone lovingly recorded on my Microsoft Access database), I met T.C. Boyle and asked him what was the most important thing a writer had to have in order to succeed. "A unique voice," he said, "You need to have a unique vision that other people don't know - of a culture, a special hobby, an obsession, whatever.""Foreign Bodies" is about this individual vision, writing about something that only you know about, those mystical moments or devastating events that make you different from anyone else in the world.I've spent the last eight years living as an expatriate, drifting regularly between Singapore, Holland and England, and intermittently between ten other countries. You learn more about your country when you're in exile. You begin to realise that certain facets of your nation which you have always considered to be good, sensible, and universally accepted, is actually fascinatingly exotic or strangely repulsive to the rest of the world. In Singapore, such features would include altars in restaurants, iguanas in the garden, centipedes in the bedroom, hole-in-the-ground toilets, coffee in milk tins and of course, the death penalty. On the other hand, Britain is probably the only country which forbids the display of unclothed cleavage on T.V. before 2200, but you can pick up a newspaper with full nipple coverage at seven in the morning.