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A Novel
by Yu-Mei Balasingamchow
Catch Me If You Can meets Counterfeit in this thrilling debut novel about Ophir—not her real name—who starts a confessional podcast about her years on the run around the globe, in an unforgettable story about the costs of freedom and the inescapable pull of home.
Ophir's tale begins in Singapore, where a petty crime spins out of control, estranging her from home and family. Resorting to false identities and forged passports (being mixed-race helps), she crisscrosses the globe from a Paris-themed hostess bar in Tokyo, to a bustling Chinese restaurant in London, to a snowbound mountain town in Colorado and beyond.
Broadcasting from an undisclosed location, Ophir is funny, prickly, tough, and vulnerable, entrancing her listeners with an irresistible, no-holds-barred recounting of not only her crimes (plural) but also her deepest secrets and regrets. Even as she moves seamlessly across class lines and continents, she grapples with the shock of relentless dislocation, a painful reexamination of identity, and a deep yearning for home. She tries to find comfort in new lovers and ill-gotten luxury goods, but she can't help attracting trouble, and she soon faces an unexpected, high-stakes choice that could change her fate forever.
Names Have Been Changed is a stylish, fast-paced debut novel that reveals the complicated paths we take to build a life and a home. Filled with danger and twists, it's ultimately a story about immigration and belonging—one unlike any you've seen before.
"An unusual, compelling picaresque about a queer Asian woman evading arrest over many years and on several continents." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[T]hrilling...Ophir is an endlessly companiable narrator despite her patently unreliable version of events, which careens like a roller coaster from one scrape, mistake, or escape to the next. It's a blast." —Publishers Weekly
"A novel that keeps gaining force." —Booklist
"I can't remember the last time a character gripped me as hard as Ophir did. Exciting, sharp, at times fun and at other times heartbreaking, Ophir held my heart in her hands and I was only too happy to give it to her." —Jesse Q. Sutanto, USA Today bestselling author of Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers
"With style and verve, Names Have Been Changed puts a sparkling new spin on the migration narrative. Ophir's gutsy and absorbing confessional will draw you in." —Lisa Ko, national bestselling author of Memory Piece and The Leavers
This information about Names Have Been Changed was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow was born in Singapore and moved to Boston, where she was a bookseller at Papercuts Bookshop and where she teaches writing workshops at GrubStreet. Her short fiction has received a Pushcart Prize special mention and been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. She has an MFA in creative writing from Boston University and has received grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Sewanee Writers Conference, and Singapore's National Arts Council. Names Have Been Changed is her debut novel.
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