Jemimah Wei in conversation

Event information

We're delighted that Jemimah will be joining us here at Real Magic Books to celebrate her new novel The Original Daughter which has been gathering rave reviews as well as being a Good Morning America Book Club and New York Times favourite.

Jemimah joins us as she travels to the UK for a week to attend the Cheltenham Literary Festival and we can't wait to welcome her. Her trip to us is supported by the Arts Council of Singapore.

Singapore, 1996. Before Arin, Genevieve Yang was an only child. Living with her parents and grandmother in a single-room flat in Bedok, she is saddled with an unexpected sibling when Arin appears, the shameful legacy of a grandfather long believed to be dead.

At once collaborators and sisters, Gen and Arin grow up inseparable, navigating the intensity of life in working-class Singapore - where urgent insistence on achievement demands self-immolation in the realms of imagination, work, and play. But as the rapidly modernising, winner-takes-all world threatens to leave one behind as the other's star rises exponentially, the sisters must weigh their allegiances and bonds, the cost of success and ultimately reckon with who they've become. What results is a story that cracks open the fault lines of Singaporean society, our desperate need for acceptance and our yearning to be loved.

Jemimah will be in conversation with Sophie and the Real Magic Bar will be open,