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The Spaces between us: Even in madness lies pockets of clarity
For readers who love the dreamlike worlds of Haruki Murakami.
With the help of a tortured poet, a dashing police officer, and a talking cat, Isla drifts through different spaces—from the evocative realms of contemporary art to the hidden landscapes of dreams. She longs to find love once more, only to discover that her very understanding of love will be tested.
Now in her thirties and living with obsessive–compulsive disorder, she roots herself in a family-owned café nestled in a quiet corner of eastern Singapore, where co-workers begin to feel more like family than her own.
This dreamy, psychological romance, infused with magical realism invites readers to plunge into the depths of love’s intensity, carrying them on an emotional, thought-provoking journey through the surreal terrain of the subconscious.
With the help of a tortured poet, a dashing police officer, and a talking cat, Isla drifts through different spaces—from the evocative realms of contemporary art to the hidden landscapes of dreams. She longs to find love once more, only to discover that her very understanding of love will be tested.
Now in her thirties and living with obsessive–compulsive disorder, she roots herself in a family-owned café nestled in a quiet corner of eastern Singapore, where co-workers begin to feel more like family than her own.
This dreamy, psychological romance, infused with magical realism invites readers to plunge into the depths of love’s intensity, carrying them on an emotional, thought-provoking journey through the surreal terrain of the subconscious.
198 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 27, 2025
About the author
Ila Perey
1 book36 followersA Singaporean literary fiction novelist influenced by contemporary art and existential philosophy. Her debut novel, The Spaces Between Us (2025), a psychological romance infused with magical realism, invites readers into a world where dreams and reality converge. Through dream symbolism and echoes of the past, higher truths unfold within moments of reflection and insight. Like the counsel of a protective friend, the narrative provides guidance in the waking world.
The From Meg to Light series celebrates resilience, love, and the enduring human spirit in the face of broken promises, soul encounters, and unfading visions. Her forthcoming works include #0.5 A Little Over a Year and #2 The Shadows Behind Us, furthering the series’ exploration of inner transformation.
Rooted in literary fiction, her novels probe the human condition with vivid, immersive prose. Her lived experience with obsessive–compulsive disorder lends her writing its reflective depth and layered perspective, where candour, incisive social critique, and reflections on contemporary issues flow.
When not crafting literary notes on Goodreads or chronicling dream symbolism on her blog, she can be found swimming, wandering museums, or taking counsel from opinionated cats.
Ila holds an LLB from University of London and a BSc from National University of Singapore. She is on threads as Inckitten.
The From Meg to Light series celebrates resilience, love, and the enduring human spirit in the face of broken promises, soul encounters, and unfading visions. Her forthcoming works include #0.5 A Little Over a Year and #2 The Shadows Behind Us, furthering the series’ exploration of inner transformation.
Rooted in literary fiction, her novels probe the human condition with vivid, immersive prose. Her lived experience with obsessive–compulsive disorder lends her writing its reflective depth and layered perspective, where candour, incisive social critique, and reflections on contemporary issues flow.
When not crafting literary notes on Goodreads or chronicling dream symbolism on her blog, she can be found swimming, wandering museums, or taking counsel from opinionated cats.
Ila holds an LLB from University of London and a BSc from National University of Singapore. She is on threads as Inckitten.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 23, 2026
There are novels that are written about mental illness, and there are novels that are written from inside one. The first kind are usually written by capable outsiders who have done their reading; the second are rarer, more uncomfortable, and infinitely more useful to a teacher. Ila Perey’s ‘The Spaces Between Us’, a quietly extraordinary debut self-published in 2025 belongs unmistakably to the second kind. Its subtitle promises pockets of clarity within madness, and the novel keeps that promise with a fidelity that the more polished commercial fictions of the genre often cannot.
I read it across two long evenings a long-long while ago, on my Kindle Fire with a digital pen in hand, and rose from the second evening convinced that this is one of the most valuable companion-texts to land on the desk of a Psychology teacher in a long while. And being an AS & A Level and an IBDP Psychology Teacher myself – I found the book to be a pedagogically rich read not only for myself but obviously for my senior students as well.
The novel is set almost entirely in present-day Singapore - its heartland malls and MRT stations, its food courts and HDB flats, its breakwaters and reservoirs and museums – all which I was not familiar with and so the atmosphere was riveting - and unfolds in three parts of unequal weight. We follow Isla, an Asian millennial recently returned to her mother’s apartment after a decade in Switzerland and France. Her marriage to Cole has ended amicably; a longer, more corrosive entanglement with a man named Marco has ended catastrophically; and the obsessive-compulsive disorder she has long carried is now, for the first time in her life, under partial medical management at the Institute of Mental Health. What happens next is for you to find out by reading this fascinating and highly reflective novel – grab it and thank me later!
What makes this novel so unusual, and so genuinely useful, is the precision with which Perey has rendered the inside of the obsessive-compulsive mind or OCD mind. There is a passage in Part I, set inside an Olafur Eliasson exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum, in which Isla stands before a piece called the Circumstellar Resonator which is a prismatic installation that bends light into intensified concentric beams - and observes that this is precisely how OCD works in her mind. Stray thoughts and feelings are caught, fed into a loop, and amplified into something disproportionate to their cause. Anger, hatred, hopelessness, but equally enthusiasm and love, all become more than they were. True. Absolutely true and really well put.
That single passage is worth bringing into a Psychology classroom on its own; it does in 3 paragraphs what most textbook descriptions of intrusive cognition take 3 pages to do less well. Perey understands, and shows, the central paradox of OCD - that the sufferer is fully aware of the irrationality of the thoughts and yet feels powerless against them - and she lets the reader feel that paradox rather than merely describing it.
For the IBDP Psychology teacher and student, the novel is a small treasure chest. The biological approach is illustrated through Isla’s low-dose medication regime, her insomnia, her sleep-architecture changes, and her recurring vivid dreams; the cognitive approach is illustrated through her active deployment of present-moment grounding (basically ‘focus on the present, focus only on what I can control’ – that sort of thing), her cognitive restructuring of intrusive material, and her quietly sophisticated dream-journaling; the sociocultural approach is illustrated through the family system she was born into (a strict, religious-conservative mother; a ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ childhood – very much what my mother was like, but where I was concerned, they were forgivable parts about her – because she is an amazing person), the cancel-culture sub-plot that engulfs her and the cafe halfway through the book, and the chosen family she eventually constructs.
The Abnormal Psychology option, in particular, will find here a richly accurate case study - symptom presentation, comorbidity with depressive episodes and suicidal ideation, partial response to pharmacotherapy, the interplay of stress and relapse. There is a moment in Part II, in a chapter set in a strangely deserted East Coast Park, in which the cold mist of a dream-world whispers to Isla that this would be a good time as any - a writerly rendering of suicidal ideation that I would, with care and the appropriate trigger warnings the novel itself provides, ask my A2 students to read alongside any standard clinical text on the subject. It will teach them more about what those words actually feel like than any worksheet on diagnostic criteria. Excellent! A book erudite in its naked frank ferociousness.
For the Cambridge AS and A Level Psychology classroom (9990), the riches are arranged a little differently but are no less abundant. The novel offers a long, deeply embedded illustration of the cognitive approach to abnormality, with a protagonist whose self-narration is itself a form of cognitive-behavioural work-in-progress. It offers material for discussion of the biological approach - medication, sleep, the brain-body interactions Isla often quietly notes - and it offers an exceptional social-approach case study in the cancel-culture sequence, where an unjustly aggrieved customer weaponizes social media against the cafe and Isla becomes the target of a coordinated online attack. That sequence is a small masterclass in the social psychology of conformity, deindividuation, in-group and out-group dynamics, and the bystander effect refracted through the architecture of modern platforms. It would pair beautifully with any teaching of the classic obedience and conformity studies, with the Cambridge A Level specialist option in Clinical Psychology when OCD is the focus, or with the Consumer Psychology specialist option when consumer behaviour, online reviews, and reputation management are at issue. Fantastic Perey! This was rigorously delicious for an intellectual focussing on this Psycho-Sociological area of the AS & A Level Psychology curriculum!
The novel’s most original psychological device, however, is its treatment of dreams. Perey has clearly read her Jung as well as her Plato (like me!), and the recurring figure of Master Luigi - the dream-counterpart of the real-world Luigi, who continues to appear in Isla’s dreams long after the real man has withdrawn - is at once a Jungian animus figure, a Platonic dialogic interlocutor (the ladder of love from Plato’s Symposium is closely rehearsed in one dream sequence), and what a contemporary clinician would recognise as an internalised therapeutic voice. It is to Perey’s credit that she does not dress this up in technical vocabulary – in fact - she lets Isla herself, in a passage of striking lucidity early in Part III, recognise that Master Luigi is a simulacrum her mind has manufactured to mirror the peace she felt in Luigi’s company, that this is a temporary survival strategy, and that the day will eventually come when she must let him fade. I have somewhat of a similar recurring dream all the time, concerning a male love interest I had a decades ago. I’ve been getting these dreams daily since the pandemic – and I need to find my closure on that ASAP. And I think I am well on my way to it like the protagonist in this intellectually stimulating and very intriguing novel.
There are quieter pleasures, too, that I want to mention in this book. The novel is unselfconsciously well-read in itself; Descartes and Berkeley argue politely with Plato; Marcus Aurelius is quoted to good effect at chapter heads; Buddhism, Rumi, and Tolstoy (oh my favorite man!) are all present without ever feeling decorative. The exhibitions Isla visits - Olafur Eliasson at the Singapore Art Museum, Nam June Paik at the National Gallery – I hope I am spelling all these correctly! - are not merely set-dressing but genuine occasions for the novel to think aloud about perception, attention, screen-mediated identity, and the ethical architecture of online life. A teacher of IB or IBDP Theory of Knowledge TOK (like me – professional at it!) will find passages here on the unreliability of sensory perception, on the difference between art and entertainment, and on the spiritual responsibilities of the technological self that could anchor an entire term’s worth of discussion.
The cat, Meg, is one of the great fictional cats of recent years and a quiet exemplar of the unconditional positive regard - she listens, she does not judge, and she is consistently more emotionally available than most of the human beings in Isla’s family of origin. My cat Lopez is not such a cat at all – she is 16 years old and has for that same period of time been suffering from an identity crisis, where she feels she is a corgi or a mountain goat more than a cat. And emotionally available she is certainly not! But a darling nevertheless! My other new found stray cat love named Prince (yes, the Purple Rain guy!) is much more caring but is a rambling rose of sorts and thinks at times that he is a cobra.
5 stars, then, and given without hesitation. ‘The Spaces Between Us’ is an honest, intelligent, generous, and genuinely educative one, and I will be quietly placing it on the shelf next to Matt Haig’s ‘Reasons to Stay Alive’ and Esmé Weijun Wang’s ‘The Collected Schizophrenias’ as one of the books I now reach for when I want to give a student a real, lived window onto what it is to carry a psychiatric diagnosis with grace. And Gen-Z appreciates the indie-books I bring into the IBDP tuition classroom. Ila Perey has written something that deserves a wider audience than self-publishing alone is likely to give it; if any commissioning editor in trade publishing happens to read this review, I hope they will take the hint. In the meantime, I commend it warmly to senior teachers of IBDP Psychology, AS and A Level Psychology, IB Theory of Knowledge (TOK), and to anyone who has loved, or lived alongside, an obsessive-compulsive OCD mind. Even within madness, lies pockets of clarity, the cover promises. The novel keeps that promise on almost every page.
I read it across two long evenings a long-long while ago, on my Kindle Fire with a digital pen in hand, and rose from the second evening convinced that this is one of the most valuable companion-texts to land on the desk of a Psychology teacher in a long while. And being an AS & A Level and an IBDP Psychology Teacher myself – I found the book to be a pedagogically rich read not only for myself but obviously for my senior students as well.
The novel is set almost entirely in present-day Singapore - its heartland malls and MRT stations, its food courts and HDB flats, its breakwaters and reservoirs and museums – all which I was not familiar with and so the atmosphere was riveting - and unfolds in three parts of unequal weight. We follow Isla, an Asian millennial recently returned to her mother’s apartment after a decade in Switzerland and France. Her marriage to Cole has ended amicably; a longer, more corrosive entanglement with a man named Marco has ended catastrophically; and the obsessive-compulsive disorder she has long carried is now, for the first time in her life, under partial medical management at the Institute of Mental Health. What happens next is for you to find out by reading this fascinating and highly reflective novel – grab it and thank me later!
What makes this novel so unusual, and so genuinely useful, is the precision with which Perey has rendered the inside of the obsessive-compulsive mind or OCD mind. There is a passage in Part I, set inside an Olafur Eliasson exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum, in which Isla stands before a piece called the Circumstellar Resonator which is a prismatic installation that bends light into intensified concentric beams - and observes that this is precisely how OCD works in her mind. Stray thoughts and feelings are caught, fed into a loop, and amplified into something disproportionate to their cause. Anger, hatred, hopelessness, but equally enthusiasm and love, all become more than they were. True. Absolutely true and really well put.
That single passage is worth bringing into a Psychology classroom on its own; it does in 3 paragraphs what most textbook descriptions of intrusive cognition take 3 pages to do less well. Perey understands, and shows, the central paradox of OCD - that the sufferer is fully aware of the irrationality of the thoughts and yet feels powerless against them - and she lets the reader feel that paradox rather than merely describing it.
For the IBDP Psychology teacher and student, the novel is a small treasure chest. The biological approach is illustrated through Isla’s low-dose medication regime, her insomnia, her sleep-architecture changes, and her recurring vivid dreams; the cognitive approach is illustrated through her active deployment of present-moment grounding (basically ‘focus on the present, focus only on what I can control’ – that sort of thing), her cognitive restructuring of intrusive material, and her quietly sophisticated dream-journaling; the sociocultural approach is illustrated through the family system she was born into (a strict, religious-conservative mother; a ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ childhood – very much what my mother was like, but where I was concerned, they were forgivable parts about her – because she is an amazing person), the cancel-culture sub-plot that engulfs her and the cafe halfway through the book, and the chosen family she eventually constructs.
The Abnormal Psychology option, in particular, will find here a richly accurate case study - symptom presentation, comorbidity with depressive episodes and suicidal ideation, partial response to pharmacotherapy, the interplay of stress and relapse. There is a moment in Part II, in a chapter set in a strangely deserted East Coast Park, in which the cold mist of a dream-world whispers to Isla that this would be a good time as any - a writerly rendering of suicidal ideation that I would, with care and the appropriate trigger warnings the novel itself provides, ask my A2 students to read alongside any standard clinical text on the subject. It will teach them more about what those words actually feel like than any worksheet on diagnostic criteria. Excellent! A book erudite in its naked frank ferociousness.
For the Cambridge AS and A Level Psychology classroom (9990), the riches are arranged a little differently but are no less abundant. The novel offers a long, deeply embedded illustration of the cognitive approach to abnormality, with a protagonist whose self-narration is itself a form of cognitive-behavioural work-in-progress. It offers material for discussion of the biological approach - medication, sleep, the brain-body interactions Isla often quietly notes - and it offers an exceptional social-approach case study in the cancel-culture sequence, where an unjustly aggrieved customer weaponizes social media against the cafe and Isla becomes the target of a coordinated online attack. That sequence is a small masterclass in the social psychology of conformity, deindividuation, in-group and out-group dynamics, and the bystander effect refracted through the architecture of modern platforms. It would pair beautifully with any teaching of the classic obedience and conformity studies, with the Cambridge A Level specialist option in Clinical Psychology when OCD is the focus, or with the Consumer Psychology specialist option when consumer behaviour, online reviews, and reputation management are at issue. Fantastic Perey! This was rigorously delicious for an intellectual focussing on this Psycho-Sociological area of the AS & A Level Psychology curriculum!
The novel’s most original psychological device, however, is its treatment of dreams. Perey has clearly read her Jung as well as her Plato (like me!), and the recurring figure of Master Luigi - the dream-counterpart of the real-world Luigi, who continues to appear in Isla’s dreams long after the real man has withdrawn - is at once a Jungian animus figure, a Platonic dialogic interlocutor (the ladder of love from Plato’s Symposium is closely rehearsed in one dream sequence), and what a contemporary clinician would recognise as an internalised therapeutic voice. It is to Perey’s credit that she does not dress this up in technical vocabulary – in fact - she lets Isla herself, in a passage of striking lucidity early in Part III, recognise that Master Luigi is a simulacrum her mind has manufactured to mirror the peace she felt in Luigi’s company, that this is a temporary survival strategy, and that the day will eventually come when she must let him fade. I have somewhat of a similar recurring dream all the time, concerning a male love interest I had a decades ago. I’ve been getting these dreams daily since the pandemic – and I need to find my closure on that ASAP. And I think I am well on my way to it like the protagonist in this intellectually stimulating and very intriguing novel.
There are quieter pleasures, too, that I want to mention in this book. The novel is unselfconsciously well-read in itself; Descartes and Berkeley argue politely with Plato; Marcus Aurelius is quoted to good effect at chapter heads; Buddhism, Rumi, and Tolstoy (oh my favorite man!) are all present without ever feeling decorative. The exhibitions Isla visits - Olafur Eliasson at the Singapore Art Museum, Nam June Paik at the National Gallery – I hope I am spelling all these correctly! - are not merely set-dressing but genuine occasions for the novel to think aloud about perception, attention, screen-mediated identity, and the ethical architecture of online life. A teacher of IB or IBDP Theory of Knowledge TOK (like me – professional at it!) will find passages here on the unreliability of sensory perception, on the difference between art and entertainment, and on the spiritual responsibilities of the technological self that could anchor an entire term’s worth of discussion.
The cat, Meg, is one of the great fictional cats of recent years and a quiet exemplar of the unconditional positive regard - she listens, she does not judge, and she is consistently more emotionally available than most of the human beings in Isla’s family of origin. My cat Lopez is not such a cat at all – she is 16 years old and has for that same period of time been suffering from an identity crisis, where she feels she is a corgi or a mountain goat more than a cat. And emotionally available she is certainly not! But a darling nevertheless! My other new found stray cat love named Prince (yes, the Purple Rain guy!) is much more caring but is a rambling rose of sorts and thinks at times that he is a cobra.
5 stars, then, and given without hesitation. ‘The Spaces Between Us’ is an honest, intelligent, generous, and genuinely educative one, and I will be quietly placing it on the shelf next to Matt Haig’s ‘Reasons to Stay Alive’ and Esmé Weijun Wang’s ‘The Collected Schizophrenias’ as one of the books I now reach for when I want to give a student a real, lived window onto what it is to carry a psychiatric diagnosis with grace. And Gen-Z appreciates the indie-books I bring into the IBDP tuition classroom. Ila Perey has written something that deserves a wider audience than self-publishing alone is likely to give it; if any commissioning editor in trade publishing happens to read this review, I hope they will take the hint. In the meantime, I commend it warmly to senior teachers of IBDP Psychology, AS and A Level Psychology, IB Theory of Knowledge (TOK), and to anyone who has loved, or lived alongside, an obsessive-compulsive OCD mind. Even within madness, lies pockets of clarity, the cover promises. The novel keeps that promise on almost every page.
September 12, 2025
Had a picture of a cat on the cover caught my attention
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews