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Stamford Hospital

Thammika Songkaeo
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Paperback / Hardback

A woman. A hospital room. A marriage coming undone.

In Singapore, an ambitious, emotionally depleted expatriate mother checks her barely ill daughter into an upscale hospital—not out of medical necessity, but as a quiet, desperate act of self-preservation. For two nights, in the stillness of white sheets and fluorescent light, she finally breathes.

Her marriage is stable but sexless. Her career, stalled. Motherhood has become a performance she can no longer sustain—especially when she feels little love as a wife to a man untouched by desire.

In this raw, daring autofictive debut, Thammika Songkaeo explores what happens when a woman on the brink dares to confront the demons in her mind.

Set in Singapore but emotionally borderless, Stamford Hospital is a piercing portrait of burnout, resentment, and the silent rebellions that so often go unnoticed. This is a novel for anyone who has ever felt imprisoned by loneliness inside the very family they built.

‘Dissecting motherhood, marriage, and the cost of selfhood with razor-sharp precision.’ — Elle Singapore

Published: Apr/2025

ISBN: 9789815233056

Length: 256 Pages

Stamford Hospital

Thammika Songkaeo

A woman. A hospital room. A marriage coming undone.

In Singapore, an ambitious, emotionally depleted expatriate mother checks her barely ill daughter into an upscale hospital—not out of medical necessity, but as a quiet, desperate act of self-preservation. For two nights, in the stillness of white sheets and fluorescent light, she finally breathes.

Her marriage is stable but sexless. Her career, stalled. Motherhood has become a performance she can no longer sustain—especially when she feels little love as a wife to a man untouched by desire.

In this raw, daring autofictive debut, Thammika Songkaeo explores what happens when a woman on the brink dares to confront the demons in her mind.

Set in Singapore but emotionally borderless, Stamford Hospital is a piercing portrait of burnout, resentment, and the silent rebellions that so often go unnoticed. This is a novel for anyone who has ever felt imprisoned by loneliness inside the very family they built.

‘Dissecting motherhood, marriage, and the cost of selfhood with razor-sharp precision.’ — Elle Singapore

Buying Options
Paperback / Hardback

Thammika Songkaeo

Thammika Songkaeo is a transnational novelist, non-fiction writer, and film producer of Thai origin, whose lived experiences in India, Uganda, Rwanda, the United States, and Singapore, have informed the making of Stamford Hospital, her debut novel following a nomination to the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, which she attended on a Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship, a fellowship to the Comparative Literature PhD program of the University of Texas at Austin, and a grant from the Smithsonian Freer|Sackler Galleries. She earned Highest Honors for her study of French Literature at Williams College and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts before becoming a Storytelling grantee of the National Geographic Society in 2022 and continuing a transnational gaze on stories of the relationship between womanhood and society. Her writing, including a feature of monologues, has appeared in Ninth Letter and in World Literature Today online, and for the Singapore National Library Board.

When not writing, she will be found working on social and environmental issues through her company, Two Glasses LLP, designing experiences that transform how people think and feel about their identity and planetary mayhem. She is the Producer of Changing Room, a dance film that asks, "What does criticizing our bodies have to do with climate change?" and its global experiential screenings that utilize somatic practices and guided journaling. Her social science work has been referenced by Brookings Institution and The Journal of Southeast Asian Human Rights. Despite these, she identifies equally as a writer.