The Twice-Worn Bangle

About this book

Beatrice reads objects the way other people read faces. A worn clasp, the colour of old solder, the depth of a ridge inside jade: each one a sentence in a story the family stopped telling. When a twice-worn bangle arrives at her bench in George Town, it carries a mark that should not exist and a claim that unsettles the Green House, a Penang family divided since 1946. The trail runs from a wartime ledger to a camphor chest, and out along the road to Kulim. A fair play mystery in which nothing is hidden from you that is not also hidden from Beatrice, and a quiet novel about the heirlooms families display and the ones they keep wrapped at the bottom of a chest.