Little Gods

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Description

One night can change a thousand futures.

On the night of the Tiananmen Square massacre, a woman gives birth alone in a Beijing hospital. Years later, her daughter Liya travels from America to China with her mother's ashes, hoping to unravel the legacy of silences and contradictions that she inherited from that night onwards.

As Liya seeks to understand her family history, we travel through Shanghai and Beijing, and deep into the past, uncovering an unexpected love triangle whose repercussions reach up to the present moment.

Ambitious, multifaceted yet intimate, Little Gods is a gripping story of migrations both literal and emotional and of the tragic impact of history on individual lives.

Reviews

'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

Author Bio

Meng Jin's narrative prose has appeared in the Threepenny Review, Ploughshare, the Bare Life Review, Vogue, and in Best American Short Stories 2020. A Kundiman Fellow, she has an MFA from Hunter College and received the David TK Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. Jin was born in Shanghai and has lived in the UK and the US.