Grace Hwang battles alongside fellow healthcare workers in Singapore when the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus strikes in 2003. She looks back at her years in Trafalgar Home, a leper colony where she lived from 1961 to 1968. Alice, a friend from Trafalgar, is dying of cancer when SARS strikes. Alice had a baby while in Trafalgar Home, who had to be given up for adoption. Now, in the thick of SARS, Grace attempts to reunite Alice with her daughter before Alice dies, and seeks to discover who found the cure to leprosy. SARS is woven together with the leprosy plotline, another frightening illness that led to its sufferers being quarantined. Although the characters in the novel are fictional, the backdrop of events and places — SARS, Trafalgar Home, leprosy and its cure — are real and an important part of Singapore’s history. Formerly known as the Singapore Leper Asylum, Trafalgar Home was a state-sanctioned asylum to detain leprosy sufferers indefinitely. The Leprosy Act was repealed in Singapore in 1976. Now, the story of Trafalgar Home is told to the many Singaporeans who have never heard of it or have forgotten it. This moving, thought-provoking story will strike at the hearts of many Singaporeans across a range of age groups, as it centres on the SARS outbreak of 2003. This event in our recent history is still remembered by many Singaporeans. In Singapore, 33 people died and 238 were infected, many who were healthcare workers who made tremendous sacrifices.

Danielle Lim’s first book, The Sound of SCH: A Mental Breakdown, a Life Journey, was co-winner of the Singapore Literature Prize 2016 (non-fiction). Published in 2014, the memoir has been translated to Chinese and published in Taiwan. The Publishers Weekly (US) has listed Danielle as one of Singapore’s top writers. She has been invited to speak at various local and international events, and was interviewed on live radio by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. She was a featured speaker at the Singapore Writers Festival in 2015 and in 2017. She has also been featured in The Straits Times, on radio 93.8 Live, on literary portal Kitaab, and in The Singapore Women’s Weekly. Danielle graduated from the University of Oxford and is based in Singapore, where she is a Lecturer at Nanyang Polytechnic and Republic Polytechnic.