Tether

From the acclaimed author of The Unpassing, a tender and meticulously observed novel, following three generations of women learning to navigate a near-future California.

Kina lives in a hamlet sealed off from the pollutants and allergens that plague the outside world, subsisting on a regulated supply of meal bars and working a tedious administrative job. She can no longer ignore what’s happening to her partner, Daniel, who is succumbing to a mysterious illness that renders him catatonic for unpredictable stretches. When the same illness begins to creep up on Kina, she is left with the impossible question of what to do with their willful, precocious daughter, Star. With few choices, Kina reluctantly sends Star to stay with her motherin-law, Flossie—seventy, stubborn, still working as an aeronautics engineer, and clinging fiercely to her freedom in the wilder outside world even as her age begins to catch up with her.

As Flossie and Star find a new rhythm together, tending their off-grid plot, playing, and testing each other’s boundaries, Flossie must contend with her deep sense of inadequacy as a guardian. Meanwhile, Kina begins to do the unthinkable: eat real food. Attending secret culinary gatherings, Kina plunges herself into the throes of sensory experiences that destabilize all she holds true about her world.

With evocative storytelling and deep compassion, Chia-Chia Lin’s Tether examines motherhood, abandonment, risk, and belonging, and how we make sense of the world together as we change within it.