Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette's

An all-girls Catholic school in Kuala Lumpur is struck by a wave of mass hysteria — screaming fits spreading from student to student until seventeen girls are affected in a single day. The novel follows Khadijah Rahmat, a quiet student processing trauma from a sexual assault, and Rachel Lian, an academic overachiever crushed under her mother's expectations.

As the two navigate the school's spiraling panic, a buried history claws its way to the surface, one bound up in sexual violence, bodily autonomy, and the ways young women's suffering gets explained away or silenced. Set in a dark-academia Catholic-school setting, Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette's uses a real historical phenomenon — mass psychogenic illness — to dramatize what happens when trauma has nowhere sanctioned to go.