Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned—from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules. Enter Mia Warren—an enigmatic artist and single mother—who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter, Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community. When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town—and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs.
Shaker Heights is more than the setting for LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE—it’s Celeste Ng’s beloved hometown. One of the first planned communities in the U.S., it was founded on utopian principles and still today brims with idealism and good, caring people. And yet, of course, Shaker Heights struggles with the same race and class issues as the rest of the nation. Through the lens of this community and her deeply human cast of characters, the book, under Ng’s unwavering eye, examines the uncomfortable truths we’re all reckoning with—issues of privilege and identity, of the right to motherhood, of ideals versus action. Like Everything I Never Told You, this is a book vital for the times we live in.
Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan. Her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, won the Hopwood Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the ALA’s Alex Award. She is a 2016 NEA fellow, and she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.