“Kaleidoscopic and wildly inventive, E.Y. Zhao’s debut Underspin is the sort of constantly shifting novel that keeps you on your toes and commands attention through its winding, beautiful prose.”
—Our Culture, “The Best Books of 2025”
“Like Challengers did to tennis last year, Underspin might do for table tennis. Zhao’s debut is wildly ambitious and searingly brilliant, jolting the reader with devastation, nostalgia, embarrassment, prestige, and sex—all in a completely unexpected field. The table is a battlefield, the players guns, the ball a bullet. More weighty still is what happens off the court: a richly imagined world where athleticism bleeds into narratives that are empathetic and sharp, tender and tight . . . Underspin is meaty with brain and brawn, radically alive in surprising ways. A tremendous writer of fiction is born.”
—Sam Franzini, Soft Union
“In the great sports novel, the game is rarely just a game. It is a mirror for the self, a stage for obsession, a pressure chamber for identity. From the disciplined collapse of Harbach’s The Art of Fielding to the philosophical drift of Chen’s So Many Olympic Exertions and the fractal intensity of Wallace’s tennis in Infinite Jest, the most enduring works in the genre use sport not to celebrate victory but to illuminate the private costs of ambition. Underspin belongs in that company. It understands that the most important matches take place far from the scoreboard, in the spaces where doubt accumulates and the body becomes a record of what it has endured.”
—Olivia Cheng, The Metropolitan Review
“Beautifully written, funny, and tragic, Underspin is a triumph of a novel.”
—Angela F. Hui, Chicago Review of Books
“Zhao captures the suspense of a table-tennis match in prose that illuminates small moments, conversations, and actions, slowly revealing what turned immense excellence into a tremendous tragedy. Zhao’s finest victory is encapsulating both the highest highs and lowest lows of Ryan’s life with the same amount of complexity, nuance, and detail. Underspin showcases the pressure, isolation, and loneliness of high-level sports . . . [A] smashing debut.”
—Clara Newton, Shelf Awareness
“This debut novel is a literary puzzle that examines the short and tumultuous life of a table tennis prodigy through the eyes of those pulled into his orbit. Early reviews include these notable takes: ‘A devastatingly heavy book about ping pong!!!!’ and ‘E.Y. Zhao did the impossible: she made me enjoy reading a book about sports.'”
—Cybil Wallace, Goodreads
“Andre Agassi’s Open meets Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad in this wildly exciting, whipsmart and beautiful novel of a tragic table tennis star, told by those who were closest to him. Mobile, adventurous, and deeply imaginative, it’s a stunner of a debut.”
—Sam Franzini, Our Culture
“A quietly devastating novel . . . Zhao is a master of careful plotting and mystery—the real kind that cottons to morally complex situations . . . A poet of table tennis, Zhao turns this underappreciated sport into a nimbly described choreography of Tomahawk serves, switch-handed chops, and forehand and backhand loops. A smart novel that examines the impact competitive sports have on kids without assigning winners or losers.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“An illuminating story of dedication and sacrifice.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Drive, desire, and determination in the table tennis world are central to exploring how outside forces can shape us. I love a good sports novel and this is a gold medal of a novel. It shocks and awes as good as the masters.”
—Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful
“E.Y. Zhao’s debut novel, Underspin, deftly constructs the world of one table tennis prodigy, all through the lives of his friends, teammates, lovers, coaches, and students . . . Full of heart and big questions about what makes life worth living. Zhao is a writer to watch.”
—Margaret, Dotters Books
“Challengers, but make it table tennis . . . I love a character portrait and I love a bildungsroman and I love a sports story that isn’t really about sports.”
—McKayla Coyle, Lit Hub
“E. Y. Zhao’s Underspin is an eruption of a debut. This novel displays a wondrous ability that renders both the central sport and lives that weave around it with meticulous precision and tremendous heart. The beauty of sport the spirit of desire and the sacrifice required for greatness are all captured here in this stunner.”
—Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars
“E. Y. Zhao writes with kinetic genius about the fast paced, ultracompetitive world of table tennis, and the bliss and heartbreak of chasing greatness. Underspin is as suspenseful as a championship game and as perfectly orchestrated as a winning shot.”
—Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise
“Underspin is a kaleidoscopic novel about many things: the dark center of hurt, its ripples, and the unpayable costs of ambition. Zhao’s prose is a marvel—sly, seductive, and cutthroat as a kill shot.”
—Rob Franklin, author of Great Black Hope
“E. Y. Zhao arrives on the literary scene like Minerva emerging from the head of Zeus: fully formed, formidable, and a superior force to be reckoned with. Who knew the world needed a table-tennis novel? Except that it is not a table tennis novel, or not just one—it is, indelibly, what the novel has always been about: the tangle of human life; error, power, damage, striving; the complicated ties that connect us in a web at once tensile, tough, and frangible. Written in beautiful, burnished prose, and structured in a dazzlingly intelligent way, Underspin will make you ask: How can this be a first novel?”
—Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others and Choice
“E. Y. Zhao’s virtuosic debut explores the underside of athletic success, spinning an intimate and exacting portrait of the high stakes world of elite table tennis. It is about the price paid when the pursuit of excellence goes awry, when love and abuse, tenderness and brutality, begin to feel synonymous. Written in kinetic, thrilling prose that vibrates on the page, Underspin will pull you into its relentless rally and leave you breathless.”
—Anelise Chen, author of So Many Olympic Exertions
“E. Y. Zhao’s Underspin hurtles down the line and leaves a trail of fire in its wake. An electric debut.”
—Jenny Tinghui Zhang, author of Four Treasures of the Sky
“An unconventional and stylish portrait of a table tennis wunderkid, Underspin explores the different forces that shape us into who we become. Zhao takes us not only into the packed competition halls and spotless training centers that define one’s career, but the intimate hotel rooms and quiet suburban kitchens that define one’s coming-of-age. Both tender and brutal, visceral and cerebral, this book will immerse you in its high-stakes world until the very last page.”
—Alina Grabowski, author of Women and Children First
“A staggeringly good debut, written with élan, compassion and wit, that takes the world of professional table-tennis and serves us a story about prestige, abuse, ambition, loyalty and the terrible results of feeling surveilled by the eye of high expectations.”
—Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time
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