LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/OPEN BOOK AWARD
"Compellingly complex...Expands the future of the immigrant novel even
as it holds us in uneasy thrall to the past." - Gish Jen, New York
Times Book Review
Combining the emotional resonance of Home Fire with the ambition and
innovation of Asymmetry, a lyrical and thought-provoking debut novel
that explores the complex web of grief, memory, time, physics, history,
and selfhood in the immigrant experience, and the complicated bond
between daughters and mothers.
On the night of June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital
alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who
until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she
calls the mind's arrow of time.
When Su Lan dies unexpectedly seventeen years later, it is her daughter
Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who
grew up in America, takes her mother's ashes to China--to her, an
unknown country. In a territory inhabited by the ghosts of the living
and the dead, Liya's memories are joined by those of two others: Zhu
Wen, the woman last to know Su Lan before she left China, and Yongzong,
the father Liya has never known. In this way a portrait of Su Lan
emerges: an ambitious scientist, an ambivalent mother, and a woman whose
relationship to her own past shapes and ultimately unmakes Liya's own
sense of displacement.
A story of migrations literal and emotional, spanning time, space and
class, Little Gods is a sharp yet expansive exploration of the
aftermath of unfulfilled dreams, an immigrant story in negative that
grapples with our tenuous connections to memory, history, and self.
