It’s a literary thriller that raises just one question – who is Celeste Ng? Yesterday, the debut author’s novel topped Amazon’s “best books of 2014” – fighting off competition from veterans such as Hilary Mantel and Stephen King.
Editors at the internet giant said they read 480 books – both fiction and non-fiction – to come up with their top 10, and described Everything I Never Told You as a “sleeper hit”, which they hope “will become the blockbuster it deserves to be”.
The 33-year-old spent six years writing the novel, which was published in the US in June to little fanfare and is out in the UK on Thursday. The story begins with the body of a girl being found in a lake in a small Ohio town – a fairly conventional opener for a thriller that’s packed with domestic secrets. What sets the novel apart, according to the New York Times (which calls it “a deep, heartfelt portrait of a family struggling with its place in history”), is the focus on a Chinese-American family in the 1970s. “If we know this story, we haven’t seen it yet in American fiction, not until now.”
Having studied at Harvard and the University of Michigan, Ng says she drew on her experiences growing up in white neighbourhoods in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Shaker Heights, Ohio. Her parents, she told NPR, “were very aware of the fact we were different and that people would make assumptions about our entire nationality or our entire ethnic group based on what I did. So, there was a little bit of the sense of, ‘OK, well you need to do well in school, because otherwise people may make these assumptions about Chinese people.’”
Now a teacher of fiction and a mother of one, Ng (whose helpful Twitter handle is @pronounced_ing) said she was gobsmacked by the news, writing on her website, “I’m still a bit in shock ... in a good way.”
