“Heaven Has Eyes”: Canadian Book Launch

Philip Holden’s short story collection Heaven Has Eyes spans three cities—Singapore, Vancouver, and London—exploring belonging across space, language, culture, and time. Its new North American edition contains new stories that consider the place of the past in the present, and which are also informed by practices of narrative care in mental health. 

Taking Singapore as a fulcrum, the collection’s stories weave together love, loss, grief, miscommunication, forgetting, and remembering. They speak to all readers curious about the interlinguistic and intercultural elements of their own and others’ lives, pushing the boundaries of realism, making and then unmaking our sense of home.

Stories of migration and belonging, some part of me wants to say, should have easy endings. They should be about arrival, about finding home. But stories are recalcitrant: they lead you to places of discomfort just when you think you have reached a conclusion. They heal, but they also leave scar tissue. The stories here are about finding a home in the world, even as they are also about belonging in difference.

This event is open to the general public and does not require registration (but please note that our seating is limited). 

Philip Holden worked for many years at the National University of Singapore, researching and teaching auto/biography studies and Southeast Asian Literatures. He is the author of Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity and the Nation-State, co-author of The Routledge Short Guide to Southeast Asian Writing in English, and one of the co-editors of Writing Singapore, the most comprehensive historical anthology of Anglophone Singapore Literature. His recent writing has focused more closely on questions of historical storytelling, interweaving academic work with historical fiction and critical fabulation. Philip has had a long association with Green College, serving as student representative on the original planning committee, and returning as a visiting scholar in 2012-13.

Photo credit: Ng Yun Sian.