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Celeste Ng

Celeste Ng writes about families who look settled from the outside and are not, and she does it with a patience that lets small tensions build. Start with «Everything I Never Told You», a portrait of a mixed-race family in small-town Ohio whose careful arrangements hide what nobody says aloud; if you want the same attention turned on a whole neighborhood, go to «Little Fires Everywhere», where two mothers with firm ideas about raising children share a town and a set of assumptions.

Feels like family, memory and unease.

Start with Little Fires Everywhere.

Ng was raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the planned Cleveland suburb her novel dissects — a town whose real architectural review board has a say in what colour you paint your house.

The particular relish a town takes in one family's catastrophe.

Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down. All spring the gossip had been about little Mirabelle McCullough—or, depending which side you were on, May Ling Chow—and now, at last, there was something new and sensational to discuss. A little after noon on that Saturday in May, the shoppers pushing their grocery carts in Heinen’s heard the fire engines wail to life and careen away, toward the duck pond. By a quarter after twelve there were four of them parked in a haphazard red line along Parkland Drive, where all six bedrooms of the Richardson house were ablaze, and everyone within a half mile could see the smoke rising over the trees like a dense black thundercloud.
Excerpt from Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng, Penguin Books 2017. Quoted for discovery. Source Rights & removals

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