LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/OPEN BOOK AWARD “Compellingly complex…Expands the future of the immigrant novel even as it holds us in uneasy thrall to the past.” – Gish Jen, New York Times Book Review Combining the emotional resonance of Home Fire with the ambition and innovation of Asymmetry, a lyrical and thought-provoking debut novel that explores the complex web of grief, memory, time, physics, history, and selfhood in the immigrant experience, and the complicated bond between daughters and mothers. 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. When Su Lan dies unexpectedly seventeen years later, it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who grew up in America, takes her mother’s ashes to China—to her, an unknown country. 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 past 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.

An epic, heart-breaking novel opening on the night of the Tiananmen Square massacre, about the legacy of migration, with a tangled family mystery at its heart On the night of the Tiananmen Square massacre, a woman gives birth alone in a Beijing hospital. Years later, her daughter Liya travels from America to China with her mother's ashes, hoping to unravel the legacy of silences and contradictions that she inherited from that night. As Liya seeks to untangle the mystery of her family, we travel through Shanghai and Beijing, and deep into the past, uncovering an unexpected love triangle whose repurcussions are felt in the present moment. Ambitious yet intimate, Little Gods is a gripping story of migrations both literal and emotional, and of the tragic impact of history on personal lives. Meng Jin's s narrative prose has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, the Bare Life Review, Vogue, and Best American Short Stories 2020. A Kundiman Fellow, she has an MFA from Hunter College, and received the David TK Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. Jin was born in Shanghai and has lived in the UK and the US.

"Everyone can use a little inspiration, a little reminder of what is truly good, moral and just. God's Little Devotional Book provides just that! These devotionals--linked to pithy quotations and also to verses from the Bible--are short and easy-to-read... but no less meaningful.You'll find anecdotes, illustrations and stories that make you laugh, challenge you to think, and in some cases, touch the soft spot in your heart. As one reader has said, "Some of these hit me right between the eyes... and others caused tears to come to my eyes." Either way, this book promises you an expanded vision and new insights. And because the devotionals are tied to the external truth of God's Word, they also will help build in you excellence of character and strength in integrity.God's Little Devotional Book is for readers of all ages, in all circumstances of life, in all professions. These devotionals are ones to which every person can relate, and from which every person can draw encouragement. They'll add meaning to your day with truth, even as they brighten your day with hope! Share them with your children. Share them with a friend. They're guaranteed to offer a road map to succeed in the daily journey of life.

God's Little Daughters examines a set of letters written by Chinese Catholic women from a small village in Manchuria to their French missionary, "Father Lin," or Dominique Maurice Pourquié, who in 1870 had returned to France in poor health after spending twenty-three years at the local mission of the Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris (MEP). The letters were from three sisters of the Du family, who had taken religious vows and committed themselves to a life of contemplation and worship that allowed them rare privacy and the opportunity to learn to read and write. Inspired by a close reading of the letters, Ji Li explores how French Catholic missionaries of the MEP translated and disseminated their Christian message in northeast China from the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, and how these converts interpreted and transformed their Catholic faith to articulate an awareness of self. The interplay of religious experience, rhetorical skill, and gender relations revealed in the letters allow us to reconstruct the neglected voices of Catholic women in rural China.

This wonderful devotional book targets children, ages 8-12, and is filled with fun stories, powerful Scriptures, and principles that will guide them for their entire lives.

A rare, original and stunning novel about a remarkable girl who learns the hard way that the truth doesn't always set you free - with echoes of Jasper Jones, Seven Little Australians and Cloudstreet. Shortlisted for the 2019 Stella Prize As a child, trapped in the savage act of growing up, Olive had sensed she was at the middle of something, so close to the nucleus she could almost touch it with her tongue. But like looking at her own nose for too long, everything became blurry and she had to pull away. She'd reached for happiness as a child not yet knowing that the memories she was concocting would become deceptive. That memories get you where they want you not the other way around. The setting is the Mallee, wide flat scrubland in north-western Victoria, country where men are bred quiet, women stoic and the gothic is never far away. Olive Lovelock has just turned twelve. She is smart, fanciful and brave and on the cusp of something darker than the small world she has known her entire life. She knows that adults aren't very good at keeping secrets and makes it her mission to uncover as many as she can. When she learns that she once had a baby sister who died - a child unacknowledged by her close but challenging family - Olive becomes convinced it was murder. Her obsession with the mystery and relentless quest to find out what happened have seismic repercussions for the rest of her family and their community. As everything starts to change, it is Olive herself who has the most to lose as the secrets she unearths multiply and take on complicated lives of their own. Little Gods is a novel about the mess of family, about vengeance and innocence lost. It explores resilience and girlhood and questions how families live with all of their complexities and contradictions. Resonating with echoes of great Australian novels like Seven Little Australians, Cloudstreet, and Jasper Jones, Little Gods is told with similar idiosyncrasy, insight and style. Funny and heartbreaking, this is a rare and original novel about a remarkable girl who learns the hard way that the truth doesn't always set you free.

An adventure, a black comedy, a fairy tale of sorts and a romance, Little Gods tells the story of larger-than-life Jean Clocker, whose birth challenges the very balance of nature and whose body resists all attempts to contain it. A girl – and later, woman – of unusual size and strength, fitting in is never an option for Jean, but it takes the chaos of war – and, later, America – to persuade her to fully appreciate her extraordinary stature. ‘A gorgeous, sprawling novel and a rich, colourful tale’ Metro ‘Four hundred and thirty-one pages of glory’ HELEN OYEYEMI ‘A wonderfully inventive ode to being different’ FT ‘Rich, gaudy, clever and irrepressible' ALI SMITH ‘A startlingly original first novel by a remarkable new talent’ Independent

Regina was born and raised in the small town of Heridos, where gods and spirits walked the earth. Until they didn't. Ten years ago, the town's harvest failed utterly, and the people---believing the gods had abandoned them--left their farms and moved on. Now, on a Friday before a long weekend, Regina ends her workday at an office in Makati, and walks home with a new colleague, Diana. Following a strange and disturbing conversation between them, Diana does not show up at work on Monday, nor Tuesday, nor Wednesday. On Thursday, Regina finds a folded piece of paper In her bag. In Diana's handwriting are two names and a strange map that will send Regina back to her hometown. Here, in her quest to find Diana, she encounters rumors of genetic experiments, stumbles upon a strange facility that no one seems to know about, finds herself in places that don't exist, and discovers that people are not who they seem to be. And the biggest question in the bizarre chain of events is not what, or how, but why? Wounded Little Gods is a tale that brings mythology to a sci-fi thriller that's filled with a sense of place--a place where gods are in many ways human and point to the ways in which humans can be inhumane. As Regina struggles to unwind the knots surrounding the mystery of this facility and the people connected to it. She discovers that she is more intertwined in the strange events in her hometown than she ever knew.

'You should do things because they're right. Not because gods say so. They might say something different another time.' Religion is a competitive business in the Discworld. Everyone has their own opinion and their own gods, of every shape and size - all fighting for faith, followers, and a place at the top. So when the great god Om accidentally manifests himself as a lowly tortoise, stripped of all divine power, it's clear he's become less important than he realised. In such instances, you need an acolyte, and fast. Enter Brutha, the Chosen One - or at least the only One available. He wants peace, justice and love - but that's hard to achieve in a world where religion means power, and corruption reigns supreme . . . 'An intriguing satire on institutionalized religion corrupted by power . . .' Independent 'Deftly weaves themes of forgiveness, belief and spiritual regeneration' The Times The Discworld novels can be read in any order but Small Gods is a standalone.