When the crypto firm Linh Bui fronted collapses in fraud, she loses everything — her job, her apartment, her income, and the identity she spent twenty years building. She wasn't the architect of the fraud. She was its face. In Singapore, that turns out to be enough.

What follows is a year of slow, unglamorous return: a small rental in Toa Payoh, a delivery rider's bicycle, the city learned from the service entrance up. And somewhere in the middle of it, a man from her secondary school who appears at her door with a GrabFood order and says, Eh, Linh ah. Long time.

What the Light Leaves is a novel about what you find when the life you built is taken away, and whether what remains is enough.

Set in Singapore. Literary fiction.