Joe Meno, Jean Chen Ho, Sanae Lemoine & Soon Wiley: A Conversation

In Book of Extraordinary Tragedies: A Novel, Aleksandar and Isobel – siblings and former classical music prodigies once destined for greatness – have been doomed by fate and a family history of failure. They’ve all but given up. But when illness forces Isobel and her young daughter to move back into the family home and she begins playing cello again, Aleks sees a world of possibility and wonder. In stories told in alternating voices, Jean Chen Ho‘s debut collection Fiona and Jane traces the lives of two young Taiwanese American women as they navigate friendship, sexuality, identity, and heartbreak over two decades. In the process, it peels back the layers of female friendship to probe the beating hearts of young women coming to terms with themselves and each other. In Sanaë Lemoine‘s The Margot Affair: A Novel, the hidden daughter of a long-standing affair wants to be seen and heard – and in the summer of her 17th birthday, she meets a journalist who will set her plan in motion. And in Soon Wiley‘s When We Fell Apart: A Novel, Min grew up in California, the son of an American father and a Korean mother. Conflicted about identity, he has moved to Seoul – and is shocked when his girlfriend, Yu-jin, dies by suicide. She was successful, ambitious, happy, and on the cusp of claiming the future of her dreams. Min’s desperate search to determine why she wanted to die leads him to questions about cultural identity, family bonds, and what it truly means to belong.