Wanting: A Novel (Unabridged)
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A Best Literary Novel of 2025 from ELLE
A searing debut novel of envy, longing, and regret across three lives and two countries that asks how far we’ll go for a friendship, a romance, a dream.
Ye Lian is thriving in Beijing. She has a well-paid job, a nice boyfriend, and plans to marry and move into a luxury high-rise apartment. She’s wanting for nothing–until her childhood best friend, Luo Wenyu, comes whirling back into her life after a decade in California with seemingly everything–a successful career as an influencer, a millionaire American fiancé, and a bespoke mansion in the Beijing suburbs–throwing Lian’s own reliable choices into high relief.
As the two women rekindle their friendship, Wenyu reveals a shocking secret about a past love that pushes Lian to question her own relationship. A few neighborhoods away, aging architect Song Chen is forced to confront his own past and the dissolution of his marriage as he’s tasked with building Wenyu’s dream home. And when the dark side of Wenyu’s enviable life emerges and threatens everything Lian and Wenyu have built for themselves, they must make a choice between the stable known and the frightening unknown that may have devastating and unexpected consequences.
In girlhood memories and karaoke afternoons in Xidan Square, in aspirational YouTube channels and billboard ads, in private hotel rendezvous and secret WeChat messages, Claire Jia’s debut novel is a love letter to friendship; a powder keg of impossible, interwoven desires; a siren song that explores why, even as it destroys us, we always want more.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This debut novel blew us away with its searingly raw portrayal of friendship, envy, and regret. Lian is only in her mid-twenties, and she seems to have it all: a boyfriend, a career, a settled life. But when her old friend Wenyu jumps back into her world after 10 years abroad, Lian finds herself questioning all of her choices. Author Claire Jia does an incredible job of evoking the giddy fun of Lian and Wenyu’s girlhood connection. She also skillfully depicts the darker feeling of comparison that can exist so insidiously at the heart of some friendships, as Lian begins to obsess over the different paths she could have taken. Before long, unflattering truths about both women begin to come out, just in time for Jia to introduce a compelling, unexpected third character: Chen, the architect presently designing Wenyu’s dream home. Katharine Chin’s narration captures all the ambivalent emotional turns of a friendship haunted by what-ifs.
