Single, Desperate, Ugly

A Novel

Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

From the internationally bestselling author of Sarong Party Girls—a brilliant and darkly satirical novel that explores what happens when Big Brother enters the bedroom.

As the leader of a new emergency task force at Singapore’s Social Development Unit, or SDU, it’s Viv Ong’s job to counter the threat of the country’s plummeting birth rates, and she needs solutions fast. At the height of her desperation, she takes on a new role in her country’s already sprawling bureaucracy: Matchmaker-in-Chief.

Viv’s idea—a modern-day boot camp for patriotic singles—looks excellent on paper. Ignoring the taunts from colleagues that SDU can also stand for 'single, desperate, ugly,' Viv is confident that with rigorous planning and stringent coupling formulas, her boot camp will produce the next great generation. Obviously, only those from the most elite backgrounds need apply. Her plan backfires spectacularly, however, when the less-than-elite Addison Quek shows up, subverting all expectations and upending Viv’s vision of what life should be.

Against the backdrop of round-the clock surveillance and mounting coercion to procreate or get erased, Viv and Addison find themselves chasing connection while navigating family and societal pressures. But it just may be that the one thing that can't be engineered or controlled is the messy human heart.

Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is the inaugural George R.R. Martin Chair in Storytelling at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. She is the author of the international bestsellers A Tiger in the Kitchen, Singapore Party Girls, editor of Singapore Noir and the co-editor of the anthology Anonymous Sex. The National Arts Council of Singapore has awarded her multiple grants in support of her writing. She was a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal and the Baltimore Sun, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, Bon Appetit, Chicago Tribune, and The (Singapore) Straits Times, among other places.

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Endorsements & Reviews

Praise for Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

“Wildly original, daring, hilarious, and heartbreaking. Written in a unqiue and captivating voice unlike any I’ve read before." John Searles, bestselling author of Help for the Haunted and Strange but True

“Utterly irresistible. Tan is saying something profound and insightful about the place of women in our globalized, capitalized, interconnected world.” Ruth Ozeki, author of A Tale for the Time Being

“In Singapore, this satirical novel of predatory beauties would be regarded as deeply subversive-for the rest of us, and anyone familiar with the life in that little island city-state, it is hilarious and original.” Paul Theroux