“Expands the future of the
immigrant novel.” – Gish Jen, New York Times Book Review


“Spectacular and emotionally polyphonic…That Jin has managed to
craft such an intimate, emotionally complex story is an awesome achievement.
That she managed to do it in her debut novel, doubly so.” – Omar El Akkad,
BookPage (starred review)


On the night
of June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins
the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has
successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind’s arrow of time.


Seventeen
years later, Su Lan’s daughter, Liya, brings her mother’s ashes to China, along
with the silences and contradictions of Su Lan’s life. In a territory inhabited
by the ghosts of the living and the dead, Liya’s memories are joined by those
of two others: Zhu Wen, the woman last to know Su Lan before she left China,
and Yongzong, the father Liya has never known. In this way a portrait of Su Lan
emerges: an ambitious scientist, an ambivalent mother, and a woman whose
relationship to her own history shapes and ultimately unmakes Liya’s own sense
of displacement.


A story of migrations literal and
emotional, spanning time, space and class, Little Gods is a
sharp yet expansive exploration of the aftermath of unfulfilled dreams, an
immigrant story in negative that grapples with our tenuous connections to
memory, history, and self.