Little Gods

"Expands the future of theimmigrant novel." - Gish Jen, New York Times Book Review

"Spectacular and emotionally polyphonic...That Jin has managed tocraft 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 nightof June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus beginsthe unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment hassuccessfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind's arrow of time.

Seventeenyears later, Su Lan's daughter, Liya, brings her mother's ashes to China, alongwith the silences and contradictions of Su Lan's life. In a territory inhabitedby the ghosts of the living and the dead, Liya's memories are joined by thoseof 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 Lanemerges: an ambitious scientist, an ambivalent mother, and a woman whoserelationship to her own history shapes and ultimately unmakes Liya's own senseof displacement.

A story of migrations literal andemotional, spanning time, space and class, Little Gods is asharp yet expansive exploration of the aftermath of unfulfilled dreams, animmigrant story in negative that grapples with our tenuous connections tomemory, history, and self.