Review: Names Have Been Changed by Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

Names Have Been Changed 

by Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

Blurb from Goodreads:

After ten years on the run around the world, Ophir—not her real name—comes clean in a confessional podcast about her life as a fugitive, charming countless fans even as she risks her freedom.

Ophir’s tale begins in Singapore, where a petty crime spins out of control, estranging her from home and family. Resorting to false identities and forged passports (being mixed-race helps), she crisscrosses the globe from a Paris-themed hostess bar in Tokyo, to a bustling Chinese restaurant in London, to a snowbound mountain town in Colorado and beyond.

Broadcasting from an undisclosed location, Ophir is funny, prickly, tough, and vulnerable, entrancing her listeners with an irresistible, no-holds-barred recounting of not only her crimes (plural) but also her deepest secrets and regrets. Even as she moves seamlessly across class lines and continents, she grapples with the shock of relentless dislocation, a painful reexamination of identity, and a deep yearning for home. She tries to find comfort in new lovers and ill-gotten luxury goods, but she can’t help attracting trouble, and she soon faces an unexpected, high-stakes choice that could change her fate forever.

Names Have Been Changed is a stylish, fast-paced debut novel that reveals the complicated paths we take to build a life and a home. Filled with danger and twists, it’s ultimately a story about immigration and belonging—one unlike any you’ve seen before.

My Review:

This was different, in a great way.  I had no idea where it was going but found COVID lockdown the perfect background for these chapters told as podcast episodes.  I don't even like podcasts but I was riveted.  And this has the perfect ending!  Give it a try!

Names Have Been Changed comes out next week on June 23, 2026, and you can purchase HERE!  

Instead I'm living in a ho-hum town in the middle of a so-so country, working yet another shit job in a long line of shit jobs, with no name to call my own. Before this COVID lockdown that they keep extending, back when we used to, you know, go to bars, flirt with people, and sleep with them if they looked or smelled good enough, I'd be lying awake in the middle of the night, after having awesome or at least adequate sex with the woman or man who called me Sheralyn or Rosie or Samira or Lint or Debby-with-a-y or whatever name I was using. And all I'd want was for that person, when they were having a fucking amazing time-or rather, an amazing time fucking, if I do say so myself—to exclaim the name my parents gave me, the name I wasn't done with when I had to give it up, the name I've buried so deep in my heart I barely remember what it sounds like in my father's voice.

I'll never hear him say it again. Because he's gone. A traffic accident a few months ago, not COVID. I found out during the first lockdown.