The Seventy-Third Step

About this book

For two hundred and seventy-two years, the granite stairway of Bukit Kabut has carried the hill town's prayers up to the Cloud Pavilion Temple: one hundred and eight steps, each cut, mended and remembered by seven generations of the same family of stone masons. Auntie Lan has swept those steps every morning for thirty-nine years, ever since the November storm when her best friend, Tan Kim Lian, vanished at twenty-one. Then a landslide opens the stair's middle flights. Beneath the seventy-third step, a sealed biscuit tin holds a dead girl's chisels, an unused bus ticket and a letter addressed to Lan. Her quiet questions begin to undo the town's oldest story, one clue and one carefully laid stone at a time.