The Ghost Bride
SynopsisPlot
Li Lan, the daughter of a respectable Chinese family in colonial Malaysia, hopes for a favorable marriage, but her father has lost his fortune, and she has few suitors. Instead, the wealthy Lim family urges her to become a “ghost bride” for their son, who has recently died under mysterious circumstances. Rarely practiced, a traditional ghost marriage is used to placate a restless spirit. Such a union would guarantee Li Lan a home for the rest of her days, but at what price? Night after night, Li Lan is drawn into the shadowy parallel world of the Chinese afterlife, where she must uncover the Lim family’s darkest secrets—and the truth about her own family.
Story
About this book
Set in 1893 colonial Malaysia, The Ghost Bride follows Li Lan, a young woman from a once-respectable Chinese family now facing financial ruin. With few marriage prospects, she receives a strange proposal from the powerful Lim family: they want her to become the bride of their recently deceased son. Ghost marriages, in which a living person is wed to the dead, were a rare custom intended to calm a troubled spirit. The arrangement would provide Li Lan with material security, but the cost is far from simple.
Li Lan's visits to the Lim household pull her into unsettling encounters with the supernatural. She begins crossing into the Chinese afterlife, a layered realm of ghost cities, paper offerings burned for the dead, bureaucratic hierarchies, and wandering spirits. Among the figures she meets is Er Lang, a guardian spirit whose intentions remain uncertain. At the same time, she finds herself drawn to Tian Bai, the living heir of the Lim family. As Li Lan moves between the world of the living and the dead, she is pressed to uncover what really happened to the Lim son and what her own family may be concealing.
