Description
Book SynopsisOn 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.
Trade Review'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
