Little Gods

“Expands the future of the

immigrant novel.” – Gish Jen, New York Times Book Review

“Spectacular and emotionally polyphonic…That Jin has managed to

craft such an intimate, emotionally complex story is an awesome achievement.

That she managed to do it in her debut novel, doubly so.” – Omar El Akkad,

BookPage (starred review)

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.

Seventeen

years later, Su Lan’s daughter, Liya, brings her mother’s ashes to China, along

with the silences and contradictions of Su Lan’s life. 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 history 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.