Description
On the night of the Tiananmen Square massacre, a woman gives birth alone in a Beijing hospital. So begins the slow unravelling of Su Lan: a woman determined to remake herself, an ambitious physicist and ambivalent mother who becomes consumed by her research into disproving the irreversibility of time. Following Su Lan's sudden death, her daughter Liya travels from the US to China to try to understand the silences and ghosts her mother left behind. Adrift in a country she doesn't know, Liya begins to piece together how her mother's obsessive desire to erase her own past has marked the lives of those around her, and Liya's own.
About the Author
Meng Jin's writing has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, the Bare Life Review, Vogue, and Best American Short Stories 2020. A Kundiman Fellow, she has an MFA from Hunter College, and received the David TK Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. Little Gods has been shortlisted for the LA Times Book Prize, the Balcones Fiction Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. Jin was born in Shanghai and has lived in the UK and the US.
Reviews
'Enthralling. Crisply told and seductively crafted, Little Gods plumbs the depths of the immigrant story to reveal something sharp, intricate, and true. I didn't want to put this book down or part with the brilliant, maddening woman at its center' - C Pam Zhang
'Meng Jin has so much to say about the legacy of the past, about families and secrets and journeys of the body and the heart. She has a sharp eye for transformation: subtle changes of feeling, huge national and international changes. Her writing has a clean, dark humour that I love. She represents the best of international literary fiction and is a much needed voice as readers clamour for artists whose insight reaches across the globe and across the years' - Bidisha
'Meng Jin's beautiful debut novel is ambitious in the best ways: meticulously observed, daringly imagined, rich in character and history. Ranging across continents, cultures and generations, Jin poses profound questions: how might we know ourselves, or the people we love? And what truths, if any, travel with us?' - Claire Messud
'Little Gods expands the future of the immigrant novel' - New York Times Book Review
Book Information
ISBN 9781911590453
Author Meng Jin
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint ONE
Publisher Pushkin Press
About the Author
Meng Jin's writing has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, the Bare Life Review, Vogue, and Best American Short Stories 2020. A Kundiman Fellow, she has an MFA from Hunter College, and received the David TK Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. Little Gods has been shortlisted for the LA Times Book Prize, the Balcones Fiction Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. Jin was born in Shanghai and has lived in the UK and the US.
Reviews
'Enthralling. Crisply told and seductively crafted, Little Gods plumbs the depths of the immigrant story to reveal something sharp, intricate, and true. I didn't want to put this book down or part with the brilliant, maddening woman at its center' - C Pam Zhang
'Meng Jin has so much to say about the legacy of the past, about families and secrets and journeys of the body and the heart. She has a sharp eye for transformation: subtle changes of feeling, huge national and international changes. Her writing has a clean, dark humour that I love. She represents the best of international literary fiction and is a much needed voice as readers clamour for artists whose insight reaches across the globe and across the years' - Bidisha
'Meng Jin's beautiful debut novel is ambitious in the best ways: meticulously observed, daringly imagined, rich in character and history. Ranging across continents, cultures and generations, Jin poses profound questions: how might we know ourselves, or the people we love? And what truths, if any, travel with us?' - Claire Messud
'Little Gods expands the future of the immigrant novel' - New York Times Book Review
Book Information
ISBN 9781911590453
Author Meng Jin
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint ONE
Publisher Pushkin Press
