So here we are six years later, and things that are even more disturbing have actually happened … The book felt like the only way for me to wrestle with some of these questions that I was asking myself, like how do we move through this? How do you raise the next generation in this world? That only increased throughout the years that followed, and that started to leach its way into the story. These feelings of anger and resentment and hatred and bigotry.

We saw the rise of the far right, we saw a lot of the elements that had been bubbling under the surface come right up to the top. And while this idea was still coalescing, Trump was elected. I started writing in October 2016, right after I had finished Little Fires Everywhere, and I thought it was going to be a fairly realistic and conventional novel about a mother-son relationship. Your new book reads as a nightmare scenario, yet it could so easily be true. She explains why what she planned as a domestic novel turned so dark. Her latest, Our Missing Hearts, is something of a departure it is set in the near future, when laws have been passed to preserve “American culture”, resulting in discrimination against Asian Americans and ultimately tearing families apart. Her follow up, Little Fires Everywhere, explored the underside of the seemingly utopian community of Shaker Heights, Ohio, where Ng lived in her teens, and became a hit TV series starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. C eleste Ng’s first novel, Everything I Never Told You, about a Chinese American family in 1970s Ohio, became a bestseller in 2014.

Everywhere book