Stamford Hospital - by Thammika Songkaeo (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A woman. A hospital room. A marriage coming undone.

In Singapore, an ambitious, emotionally depleted expatriate mother checks her barely ill daughter into an upscale hospital--not out of medical necessity, but as a quiet, desperate act of self-preservation. For two nights, in the stillness of white sheets and fluorescent light, she finally breathes.

Her marriage is stable but sexless. Her career, stalled. Motherhood has become a performance she can no longer sustain--especially when she feels little love as a wife to a man untouched by desire.

In this raw, daring autofictive debut, Thammika Songkaeo explores what happens when a woman on the brink dares to confront the demons in her mind.

Set in Singapore but emotionally borderless, Stamford Hospital is a piercing portrait of burnout, resentment, and the silent rebellions that so often go unnoticed. This is a novel for anyone who has ever felt imprisoned by loneliness inside the very family they built.

'Dissecting motherhood, marriage, and the cost of selfhood with razor-sharp precision.' -- Elle Singapore

About the Author

Thammika Songkaeo is a transnational novelist, nonfiction writer, and film producer of Thai origin, whose lived experiences in India, Uganda, Rwanda, the United States, and Singapore have informed the making of Stamford Hospital, her debut novel following a nomination to the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, which she attended on a Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship, a fellowship to the Comparative Literature PhD programme of the University of Texas at Austin, and a grant from the Smithsonian FreerSackler Galleries. She earned the highest honours for her study of French Literature at Williams College and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts before becoming a Storytelling grantee of the National Geographic Society in 2022 and continuing a transnational gaze on stories of the relationship between womanhood and society. Her writing, including a feature of monologues, has appeared in Ninth Letter and in World Literature Today online, and for the Singapore National Library Board. When not writing, she can be found working on social and environmental issues through her company, Two Glasses LLP, designing experiences that transform how people think and feel about their identity and planetary mayhem.