Surprise Your Shelf

Every two months, Wormhole invites a different person to curate a mystery book. Our curators all come from different backgrounds and walks of life, so you'll never quite know what to expect.

Take a chance, explore someone else's perspective, and surprise yourself. Find out more here.

NOTE
All Surprise Your Shelf (SYS) books come with free normal mail. SYS orders are open till 14 April, 23:59. We expect to send them out in late May.

If you're making other purchases together with your SYS order, they will be shipped out first.

SURPRISE YOUR SHELF #11: RUBY
Genre: Fiction

The Book: In a way, this mystery book is a debut, even though an avid reader is likely to have come across the author's name before. This collection of short stories is the author's personal playground, toying with language, metaphor, setting, and genre — all the things that make a story. The book restlessly flits from China to Stockholm, from body horror to speculative historical fiction, and at several points, gets slyly autobiographical. It's almost like the book has an identity crisis (which will make perfect sense, when you find out the title and the author's process), but trust us. You won't be complaining.

Read if you: always reply with "I read everything" when someone asks what's your favourite genre.

The Curator: Ruby Thiagarajan is a writer and editor. She co-founded Mynah, an independent longform print magazine about Singapore. Her essays have been published in New Naratif, Portside Review, Mekong Review and elsewhere. She also writes a newsletter about books and cultural criticism called Tote Bag Library.