A Michelle Obama’s Reach Higher Summer Reading List Pick • An NPR Critics Summer Pick • A Good Morning America Pick of the Month • A GoodReads Big Buzz Debut • A Tertulia Staff Pick of the Month • An Electric Literature Best Novel of 2023
“Compelling . . . Studded with sublime wit.” ―New York Times Book Review
“A glorious, pondering, heartbreaking, extremely funny, very special book.” ―Sarah Jessica Parker
In A Quitter’s Paradise, the darkly humorous debut by bold new voice Elysha Chang, a young woman does everything she can to ignore her mother’s death, even as unearthed family secrets become increasingly inextricable from her own.
Eleanor knows she’s been acting strangely. She’s dropped out of her PhD program and is ignoring calls from her husband. Lately, she finds herself walking circles in the park, leaving a trail of nuts and raisins in her wake. It’s all, in some sense, a response to her mother’s recent death. This she knows. But Eleanor can’t understand how you are supposed to grieve a mother you never understood. How do you love a person who refused to make herself known?
As Eleanor wends her way forward, we catch glimpses of the past. Eleanor’s parents emigrate from Taiwan to Queens in 1979. The couple thrives in business, importing Taiwanese-made trinkets and managing a growing number of workers at their warehouse. But Rita and Jing Liu remain confounded by the process of raising their two daughters. How do you dole out affection, discipline, protection, and care in a strange place, in a foreign tongue?
Deliciously provocative and exquisitely crafted, A Quitter’s Paradise is an intimate, intergenerational saga of American immigrant ambition, and a profound contemplation of its long afterlife. With a deft hand and a humor distinctly her own, Elysha Chang explores the extent to which we unwittingly guard the hearts of our loved ones, even from ourselves.
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