Little Gods

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.