Library of Lost Hearts: A Short Story Anthology

Let this be your last warning: This is no ordinary library. None of the books on these shelves can be found anywhere else, for the stories they contain are either unfinished, forgotten, or rejected—cast aside by heartbroken writers. Once remembered and published as real books to be cherished and commemorated in history, the stories will vanish from the library’s shelves.

All of this was a fine arrangement: a moving library touring small towns around Mount Impossible, favouring Purnama Hollow as its home, with a librarian who loves coffee, mornings, and silence. Until one day, a rogue story—a story with the ability to kidnap readers into its pages upon reading the first line—appears in the Library of Lost Hearts, one after another. Six of them, to be exact.

Follow the librarian and her friends: Kenanga, an ex-author who left the publishing world; Seroja, an amicable baker who gives hugs for free; Melur, a quiet believer in the library’s potential; and Akram, the matcha truck owner next door, as they find themselves in the peculiar worlds the rogue stories lure them into.

Find yourself holding blood-red tulips, turning into a butterfly that reverts back to a pupa at every inconvenience, haunting a village as a pontianak with a sword buried in her chest, discovering the truth of what really happened on Gunung Ledang, losing sense and sanity in the walls of a heartbreak asylum, and getting lost in the Milky Way with an astronaut performing open-heart surgery in space.

It is too late to turn back now. You have read too far…