OUR MISSING HEARTS by Celest Ng

OUR MISSING HEARTS is Celeste Ng’s follow up to Little Fires Everywhere, a New York Times bestseller and one of the best books of 2017 by NPR, the Guardian, and many more. In her new novel, we follow Bird Gardner, a 12-year old Chinese American boy, in a quest to find his mother—a poet who mysteriously left home after her work was criticized during a recent period of political upheaval.

In Ng’s alternate version of the present, new laws prevent the sharing of different ideologies and children often disappear when their parents dissent. In his search, Bird discovers an underground network of activists fighting to reunite children with their loved ones and to uncover the truths hiding in plain sight. While the book is a work of fiction, it’s inspired by real-life events and legislation—from Japanese internment and McCarthyism to more recent book bannings—presenting a reality that’s at once jarring and too easy to imagine.

- Recommended by Stephen