Hunter Ng

Hunter Ng

PhD Candidate @ Baruch College

As Coarse As Emporium

As Coarse As Emporium book cover

As Coarse As Emporium is a Singaporean noir thriller novel about ten-year-old Bee, who grows up inside a Singapore shopping mall known as The Emporium.

Summary

In a Singapore shopping mall known only as The Emporium, ten-year-old Bee finds himself dealing with many weird and strange tenants. From a mysterious shop selling illegal gameboy cartridges to the disappearance of a Four-Faced Buddha Statue, Bee witnesses these incidents and must make sense of them. Together with helen, his adoptive mother, who works in a salon to make ends meet, Bee matures quickly to handle what The Emporium throws at him. However, can the duo take on the odds in this building? Or will they burn their hands playing with fire? Join them in this uniquely Singaporean noir thriller.

Author’s Note

I wrote this novel during the Covid pandemic as I was about to begin my life overseas and feared losing the precious memories I had of Upper Serangoon Shopping Centre, which I had grown up in. I would remember running like a wild monkey up and down the escalators in the building, playing catching with the children of the other tenants. The memories are fading but poignant. I want to present these true memories in a way that would be easy for the reader and in a uniquely Singaporean manner. As such, I chose a thriller novel as the genre. About 95% of the incidents in the book are true and it would be like a glimpse into the past of the shopping centers in Singapore, in particular, Upper Serangoon Shopping Center. I didn’t do much publicizing of the book when I wrote it and self-published but I hope that the book continues to carry on these forgotten stories of what truly happened in old malls in Singapore. Thank you.

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