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Out May 2024 (UK)

Out September 2024 (U.S.)

What Reviewers Say:

Melissa Fu, Author of Peach Blossom Spring:

‘Steeped in a rich tapestry of language, food, fashion, politics and art, THE LIGHT BETWEEN US tells the stories of Charlie Tze-Soh, a 21^st century photographic archivist, and Wang Tian Wei, a photographer in 1930s-1940s Singapore. Though separated by nearly a century, they establish a mysterious, soulful connection while burning time’s candle at both ends. With impeccable research and a light touch, master storyteller, Elaine Chiew renders a novel that is at once a love story, a meditation on photography, an elegant historical fiction, and a gripping tale that enchanted me to the very last page. I finished the book pondering the ways in which our pasts and our futures are intricately woven together. Bravo for this incredible book and tremendous talent!’

Mahita Vas, Author of A Good Day to Die and It Happened on Scrabble Sunday:

“This is an engrossing tale of bittersweet love and longing simultaneously straddling two eras in Singapore: a young archivist and her adoptive brother in the present-day city and a photographer in colonial times. The separate worlds of Cantonese photographers, Japanese soldiers and an ambitious young civil servant orbit over the Internet when the photographer mysteriously appears on the archivist’s computer screen, luring her into a celestial realm in her basement office. Told through archived photographs, Chiew immerses the reader in old Singapore and the harrowing years of the Japanese Occupation while moving seamlessly into the lives of a  wealthy family led by a devious matriarch. Meticulously researched and richly crafted, The Light Between Us dances elegantly between truths and lies, promises and threats, and between a sweet dream and harsh reality.”

Sequoia Nagamatsu, Bestselling Author of How High We Go In The Dark:

“Interrogating the honesty and possibility of photographs, Chiew masterfully entangles a love transcending time and space with speculative finesse. Like the letters within the novel, these pages manifest the past and present—not just mere words, not mere image but a sensory cornucopia that one can step inside to interrogate heart and truth, colonial past as well as the ghosts of colonialism that remain in the same streets and buildings, which now carry different names. A genre-defying, labyrinthine, and luscious novel that doesn’t pull its philosophical punches as it dares to thrill. .”

Wiz Wharton, Author of Ghost Girl, Banana:

“Meticulous and wholly original, The Light Between Us is a novel that achieves that rare combination of being mighty in its ideas yet intimate in its truths. Both an enthralling love story across time and space and a vibrant meditation on the uncertainties of art, belief and loss in an increasingly fractured world, its writing will leave you breathless and its characters will stay with you long after the last page is turned..”