Kaya Toast for the Soul

A Novel in Four Stories

By Hernping Ang

Down a quiet staircase beneath a block in Bishan is a shop filled with second-hand books, old CDs, kaya toast and half-boiled eggs.

Most people find it by accident. They come in to wait out the rain, look for a forgotten album, or sit somewhere that does not ask why they are not ready to go home.

A few have heard about the old Sony Discman behind the counter.

Play the right song, and the shop may open a door into a memory that has never fully ended.

But the Discman does not always take people where they ask to go.

A woman searching for the longest song is returned to the childhood beneath the life she carefully built. A man longing for the country and girl he left behind finds himself inside an older journey with his grieving father. Others encounter unfinished love, old regrets, and younger versions of themselves still waiting to be understood.

Set in a quietly magical corner of Singapore, Kaya Toast for the Soul is a tender novel in four interlinked stories about memory, grief, longing, regret and the small acts of care that help people keep going.

It is about the lives we imagine we lost.

The people who remain young inside our memories.

The songs that find us before we understand what we are grieving.

And the ordinary kindness of being given somewhere to sit until the rain becomes possible to walk through again.

From the Author

I have always been interested in the way music carries memory.

A song can return us to a room, a person, a road, a corridor, or a version of ourselves we thought we had left behind. Sometimes it brings back joy. Sometimes grief. Sometimes it returns something smaller and harder to explain: the light through a window, the smell of rain on concrete, or the sound of someone singing slightly behind the melody because the silence had become too difficult.

Kaya Toast for the Soul grew from that feeling.

The book is fictional, but its emotional world comes from experiences I have encountered in my own life, in therapy rooms and in the stories people carry quietly for years. Its characters are people who have continued living while some part of them remained elsewhere: inside an unfinished relationship, a family loss, an imagined future, or an afternoon they never fully understood.

At the centre of the book is a small basement shop in Bishan. It contains old CDs, second-hand books, a toaster, an egg cooker, iced Milo and a table beneath the stairs. The shop is imagined, although parts of it feel real to me. It belongs to the Singapore I know best: ordinary, practical, slightly tired and full of small mercies.

In these stories, the past does not offer clean answers or perfect repairs.

The memories do not restore every relationship or reveal the life that might have unfolded if someone had chosen differently. Sometimes they only allow a person to see an old moment with greater honesty. Sometimes that is enough to make the road home feel possible.

Thank you for supporting this book. Every purchase supports the wider work I do through Kaya Toast for the Soul and the mental health social enterprise I run. It helps me continue creating books, resources and projects that make emotional pain feel less lonely and easier to understand.

This book is for the people still waiting on old staircases.

For those who kept driving even when they did not know the way.

For the songs that found us before we knew what we were grieving.

And for anyone who has ever needed a small kindness to keep going.

Book Details

Title: Kaya Toast for the Soul

Subtitle: A Novel in Four Stories

Author: Hernping Ang

Publisher: Kaya Toast for the Soul

Language: English

Publication year: 2026

Edition: First edition

Format: Four interlinked stories with a shared setting and characters

Genre: Literary fiction / Magical realism / Psychological fiction

Setting: Bishan, Singapore

Interior: Primarily text-based, with illustrated story and chapter ornamentsCover: Full-colour illustrated artwork

Length: Approximately 270 pages in the current 5.5 × 8.5-inch PDF; confirm after the final print layout is locked

Available formats: PDF and EPUB

Themes: Memory, grief, unfinished love, family loss, regret, migration, imagined lives, loneliness, emotional survival, music, ageing, compassion and home.