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Little Fires Everywhere

Little Fires Everywhere 1

by Celeste Ng
Paperback
Publication Date: 12/09/2017
4/5 Rating 1 Review

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The New York Times Top Ten Bestseller

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.

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned - from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren - an enigmatic artist and single mother- who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When old family friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town - and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at an unexpected and devastating cost...

'To say I love this book is an understatement...It moved me to tears' Reese Witherspoon

'Just read it...Outstanding' Matt Haig

'Highly recommended, beautifully written and thought-provoking'

'An engrossing read'

'Absolutely brilliant'

'Great characters, interesting plot that leaves you desperate to read more and written beautifully. I loved it and highly recommend it!'

ISBN:
9781408709726
9781408709726
Category:
Contemporary fiction
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
12-09-2017
Publisher:
Little, Brown Book Group Limited
Country of origin:
United Kingdom
Pages:
400
Dimensions (mm):
234x157x27mm
Weight:
0.46kg
Celeste Ng

Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan.

Her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, won the Hopwood Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the American Library Association's Alex Award.

She is a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, and she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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1 Review

The suburbs have become the ultimate battleground of modern fiction these days. Once the bastion of all that is wholesome in society, suburbia is now a place where fictional characters air their dirty laundry with gusto and tensions erupt at the slightest tremor. While there are certainly many of these kinds of books hitting the shelves these days, very few of them are half as good as Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere. Or at least as interesting.

Ng sets her book in the wealthy suburb of Shaker Heights, where everyone lives a carefully constructed life, drives a Jeep, and are restricted from painting their houses in any colour other than pale blue or beige. Within this equalising colour palette, it’s not hard to understand why the residents of Shaker Heights emphatically claim that “no one sees race,” which is, of course, a roundabout way of saying that everyone does. This becomes all too obvious when a racially-charged custody battle rocks the suburb, fueled in part by the arrival of artist Mia Warren and her daughter Pearl.

In the hands of another writer this story might have become far too overwrought, too mired in the sentimental drama of its plot to offer any kind of intelligent story to the reader. Ng is not that writer. Instead, Little Fires Everywhere is a wondrous exercise in restraint, its voice measured but undeniably affecting, that trusts the story’s emotional kick to emerge from the interactions of its characters. These interactions hum with the same wry humour that Liane Moriarty has perfected, but there’s a vulnerability in the writing that prevents the characters from ever becoming archetypal parodies. Ng treads the thin line between parody and pathos with such precision that she can deliver a big message about race and class with a little punch, in a voice that’s controlled but quietly incendiary. Readers, this is one for the book clubs.

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