We Are Not Alone Here

An intricate blend of mystery and horror with a feminist take on the roles of womanhood, especially motherhood, in contemporary time.

An unnamed young woman and her companion strike up a conversation in the dark in a quiet room, in the middle of nowhere. As they talk, the young woman starts to open up about her life, discussing her past and childhood, growing up in a single-parent household under impoverished conditions, living under the cold, steely eye of an estranged and manipulative mother who physically and emotionally abused her.

The woman gradually divulges the lies and secrets that have plagued her life from a very young age, and how all of it has led her to make hard choices along the way—being a mistress to her boss at her first job, having a child out of wedlock, raising a child all on her own, and then tragically losing him in a drowning.

The truth becomes stranger and more complicated as the woman continues to tell her story, braiding and twisting the facts and sequence of events as she narrates, soon revealing a long unvoiced history of pain, violence, and deception. This ultimately culminates in her committing a series of horrific and terrible acts.

What has seemed clear and straightforward at the start of the woman's story soon becomes a strange febrile dream that holds the woman and her companion in a complicit, unbreakable spell.

We Are Not Alone Here by O Thiam Chin invites readers into this gripping narrative where the boundaries between truth and fiction blur, and the haunting themes of power, control, and survival are unraveled.