Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng announced her arrival as a powerful new novelist in 2014 with the complex, moving story of Lydia, a high-achieving, biracial high school student who suddenly disappears from her home in 1970s Ohio. In Everything I Never Told You, Ng breaks the news to the reader on the first, gripping page: Lydia is dead, but all her family knows for now is that she hasn’t shown up at the table for breakfast. It’s not long before the teenager’s body is pulled from the depths of the local lake. The mystery of what happened to Lydia—and why—is what propels the narrative, haunting her family members. In their grief, Lydia’s white mother, Chinese American father, older brother, and younger sister each grapple with their diverging understandings of the kind of person Lydia was and was meant to be, while Ng casts a look back at the adversity her parents endured to build their now-shattered life together. Ng, who later published Little Fires Everywhere and Our Missing Hearts, has a particular talent for weaving the most irresistible elements of genre fiction into her literary novels—turning intricate, character-driven interrogations of life’s most challenging questions about identity, love, and belonging into page-turning best-sellers. —Lucy Feldman

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