Bird is 12 years old and his life is pretty normal—except that his mother mysteriously vanished one day a few years ago, his father is always on edge, and there are certain things he’s not allowed to ask questions about at school. In Celeste Ng’s shudder-inducing third novel, Our Missing Hearts, the young protagonist slowly begins to realize that something is very wrong with the world in which he’s coming of age—and that finding his mother is the only way to get answers. Ng, whose previous novels subtly probed tensions surrounding race, class, and gender, boldly tackles anti-Asian racism head-on. —Lucy Feldman
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