Paperback: One morning, Deming Guo’s mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her.
With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. They rename him Daniel Wilkinson in their efforts to make him over into their version of an “all-American boy.”
But far away from all he has ever known, Daniel struggles to reconcile his new life with his mother’s disappearance and the memories of the family and community he left behind.
Set in New York and China, The Leavers (2017) is a vivid and moving examination of borders and belonging. It is the story of how one boy comes into his own when everything he has loved has been taken away, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of her past.
This powerful debut is the winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver for a novel that addresses issues of social justice. It was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award in Fiction, the 2017 Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award and a finalist for the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award.
The Leavers was named a best book of the year by NPR, Entertainment Weekly, BuzzFeed, The Los Angeles Times, Electric Literature, O, The Oprah Magazine, Paste Magazine, Irish Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Barnes and Noble, The Christian Science Monitor and Book of the Month Club Pick.
The Leavers was inspired by a 2009 New York Times story about an undocumented immigrant woman who was held, largely in solitary confinement, for more than a year and a half.
About the author: Lisa Ko is an American writer. She has been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the MacDowell Colony, among others. She is a Spring 2020 Shearing Fellow at the Beverly Rogers, Carol C Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has written for the New York Times. Born in Queens and raised in Jersey, she now lives in Brooklyn. For speaking engagements, contact speakersbureau@workman.com
Rating: 5/5
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