BLOCK 8

BLOCK 8 is a warm and sharply funny novel set in the heart of 1983 Singapore — in a two-room HDB flat on the seventh floor of Block 8, Toa Payoh. It is the story of six families who share more than just walls: they share food, arguments, late-night worries, and an extraordinary amount of laughter.

At the centre is Pak Mail, a fireman who brings home the first colour television on the floor — and in doing so, accidentally brings everyone else into his living room for the next eight years. Around him live Mak Cik Rokiah, the widow who knows everyone's business before they do; Uncle Ah Kow and Auntie Mei Lan, the Chinese mechanic and his tireless wife who remembers every neighbour's dietary needs; Rajan, the serious bank clerk who secretly makes the best dhal in Toa Payoh; and a rotating cast of children, elders, and well-intentioned strangers who wander into the corridor and stay for tea.

Across fifteen chapters — from a heated cook-off on the corridor floor to a midnight fever, from stolen kuih to a PSLE result that the whole floor celebrates — BLOCK 8 captures a Singapore that many remember and many more wish they had known: a time when neighbours knocked without warning, borrowed without asking, argued without malice, and loved without ceremony.

Funny, tender, and deeply human, this is a novel about what it means to live alongside people who are nothing like you — and discover that, somehow, they have become your family.