Wolf’s Path

By Joyce Chng Fiction/Atthis Arts/Paperback/247 pages/$34.70

Over two decades, Singaporean teacher-turned-writer Joyce Chng has wrestled with identity through writing, whether in relation to profession, disability or gender.

This deeply personal anthology published in 2025, and now shortlisted in the Best Collection category of the British Fantasy Awards, is the airing of that built-up howl.

The speculative stories here are optimistic, even heroic, but under the surface, there is also a deep vein of melancholy.

These are stories as escape, as fitful efforts of reimagining. Each pines for the Star Trek dictum of infinite diversity in infinite combinations, only to reinforce the unsaid painful limitations of real life.

Wolf’s Path is titled after Chng’s – whose preferred pronouns are they and them – own fascination with wolves and how the animal learns about, and expands, its territory through sniffing and exploring.

There is a short story here literally about a human who secretly believes they are a wolf – “I don’t tell people about wolf. The last time I did, I was sent to a counsellor.”

But Chng also takes on many other worldly and unworldly forms in settings where rules about gender, sex and species have been entirely rewritten.

There is a tiger demon who is match-made with the spirit of a male scholar in a queer pairing just about stomached by his subjects; a fading mother whose brain becomes attached to an alien-fighting spaceship; and a child implanted with the seed of a gigantic prayer mantis invader.

Yet the fantastical settings never feel forced nor like flights of childish fancy. Chng wears the...