What's Left of Me Is Yours : Stephanie Scott & Jing-Jing Lee

What's Left of Me Is Yours is set in modern-day Tokyo and inspired by a true crime. It charts a young woman’s search for the truth about her mother’s life–and her murder. It's breathtaking and breathless and brilliant.

“Remember that new-discovery, time-stopping, every-moment-is-magical kind of love? That’s what it felt like to read this novel. Then limerence turns to passion which leads to tragedy and suddenly this book is impossible to put down as you speed toward a conclusion that is as surprising as it is satisfying.”—JAMIE FORD

It is a huge privilege to welcome Stephanie Scott, one of Lighthouse's original Life Raft authors, for a proper launch of her utterly gripping debut, an in conversation event with Jing-Jing Lee!

In Japan, a covert industry has grown up around the “wakaresaseya” (literally “breaker-upper”), a person hired by one spouse to seduce the other in order to gain the advantage in divorce proceedings. When Satō hires Kaitarō, a wakaresaseya agent, to have an affair with his wife, Rina, he assumes it will be an easy case. But Satō has never truly understood Rina or her desires and Kaitarō’s job is to do exactly that–until he does it too well. While Rina remains ignorant of the circumstances that brought them together, she and Kaitarō fall in a desperate, singular love, setting in motion a series of violent acts that will forever haunt her daughter’s life.

Told from alternating points of view and across the breathtaking landscapes of Japan, Stephanie Scott exquisitely renders the affair and its intricate repercussions. As Rina’s daughter, Sumiko, fills in the gaps of her mother’s story and her own memory, Scott probes the thorny psychological and moral grounds of the actions we take in the name of love, asking where we draw the line between passion and possession.

“I loved it. Gripping, heartbreaking, immersive. I read it with my heart in my throat.” —Sara Collins, author of THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANNIE LANGTON

The Writer

Stephanie Scott is a Singaporean and British writer who was born and raised in South East Asia. She read English Literature at York and Cambridge and holds an M.St in Creative Writing from Oxford. Scott won a BAJS Toshiba Studentship for her anthropological work on her novel What's Left of Me Is Yours and has been made a member of the British Japanese Law Association as a result of her research. What's Left Of Me Is Yours is a New York Times Editor's Pick, an Observer Best Debut of 2020, a Daily Mail and Woman & Home Book of the Year, and was recently longlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award and the Jhalak Prize Book Of the Year by a Writer of Colour.

The Host

Jing-Jing Lee Born and raised in Singapore, Jing-Jing Lee’s first novel, How We Disappeared, was published by Oneworld in 2019. It has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Singapore Literature Prize and the Historical Writers’ Association Debut Crown. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford and currently lives in Amsterdam with her husband and son.