Our Missing Hearts
‘Will break your heart and fire up your courage’ Mail on Sunday
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4.4 • 8 Ratings
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- €5.99
Publisher Description
'It's impossible not to be moved' Stephen King
'Stunning...this novel will break your heart and fire up your courage' Mail on Sunday
The New York Times bestseller, a deeply heart-wrenching novel about the unbreakable love between a mother and child and a TIMES BEST PAPERBACK OF APRIL 2023
Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. His mother Margaret, a Chinese American poet, left without a trace when he was nine years old. He doesn't know what happened to her-only that her books have been banned-and he resents that she cared more about her work than about him.
Then one day, Bird receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, and soon he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of heroic librarians, and finally to New York City, where he will finally learn the truth about what happened to his mother, and what the future holds for them both.
Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. It's about the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children, and the power of art to create change.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Celeste Ng’s knack for tense family drama is given a dystopian overlap for her third novel, Our Missing Hearts, made all the more emotionally hollowing by the fact that the future Ng imagines for 12-year-old Bird and his family is more of a reimagining—something that has happened before, is still happening now in certain parts of the world, and increasingly feels like will happen again very soon. The “missing hearts” of the title refer to the children removed from their families under the authority of a national security law called PACT, which disproportionately targets Asian-American and other minority communities. Taken from a line in a poem, “our missing hearts” has inspired the rallying cry for revolutionaries pushing back against the fascist regime, and Bird’s mother, the poet who authored it, is forced to leave her family behind when Bird is nine years old, to protect them from the repercussions of being connected to the protests. The story follows Bird’s attempts to find his mother and Ng writes about the heartbreak of family separation with devastating intuition, weaving in the additional tremors of racism, police brutality and the suffocating oppression of life under draconian rule. Profoundly beautiful, achingly melancholy and impossible to forget once you put it down.
