Chinese-Malaysian thirty-something lady Andrea Tang, is our guide to the life of a professional in one of Singapore's top law firms. Brace yourselves for chaos and tears and internet addiction, because she’s a Bridget Jones in Singapore. LAST TANG STANDING alludes to the fact that Andrea is the last girl of her family to be unwed. Apparently the pressure is on from parents, especially mothers, for girls to be hard-working and successful, right up to the point where the pressure suddenly becomes about having babies.

Andrea is no stranger to other societies, as she went to college in England, but she hoped to be a lawyer to help others, only to find that she had to take any well-paid law job to pay her college debt. Now she’s sunk so many hours and years into properties and contracts, sitting in the office until late evening just to look dedicated, that she has no hobbies, no friends and no conversation. And no boyfriend, just to be clear.

Suresh Aditparan is an office colleague, with his own tangled personal life and a fiancée in England. He’s sort of competing with Andrea for a raise to the next level in the firm. So he’s obviously not on the dating potentials list. There’s Orson, a guy Andrea meets out of nowhere after joining some dating app. But could you trust some random guy younger than yourself who doesn’t have an online profile?  There’s a lot of sad, sick and lonely guys on the wider internet. Eric Deng, however, is very much here and now, and he turns out, after they meet at the most over the top high society book club meeting imaginable (with waiters and oysters) to be seriously moneyed. So how likely is that to work? Humour mixes with near parody.  

The net addiction did get wearying as Andrea can’t put her phone down, telling us all her texts and mails and What’s Apps, and on holiday her one girl friend Linda has to take away her three phones. But Andrea does recognise (at last) that it’s an addiction, like her drinking, and tries to do something about it, so we are warned. Andrea comes across as younger than thirties, mid-twenties or so, but maybe that’s just because it’s a chick-lit book, or maybe Singaporeans are leading that kind of life. LAST TANG STANDING by Lauren Ho shows us a world that many women will recognise, and shows how young women are under pressure, not to have it all, but to compete with men who don’t have the same biological clock to defeat. In that sense, this is a book for every woman today.