Book
The Ghost Bride
by Yangsze Choo
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In colonial Malacca in 1893, seventeen-year-old Li Lan belongs to a once-prosperous Chinese family whose debts have narrowed her prospects. The wealthy Lim household proposes that she become a ghost bride to its recently deceased heir, Lim Tian Ching: a marriage that could restore her family’s position but would bind her future to a dead man. Tian Ching begins to invade her dreams, while Li Lan is drawn instead to his living cousin, Tian Bai.
After illness separates Li Lan’s spirit from her body, she must travel through an afterlife of ghost cities, paper offerings, corrupt officials and unsettled ancestral obligations. Her search for the truth behind Tian Ching’s death turns a marriage plot into a supernatural mystery, using Peranakan Chinese society and religious tradition to explore debt, class, family duty, romantic choice and the limited freedom available to a young woman in the Straits Settlements.
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