
October '22 Pick
Our Missing Hearts
Celeste Ng
From the #1 bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere, comes one of the most highly anticipated books of the year – the inspiring new novel about a mother’s unbreakable love...
Our Missing Hearts
From the #1 bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere, comes one of the most highly anticipated books of the year – the inspiring new novel about a mother’s unbreakable love in a world consumed by fear. “Firmly written and well-executed . . . Our Missing Hearts is a meditation on the sometimes accidental power of words.” —Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review “Ng’s most powerful work to date.” —People Magazine Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture” in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old. Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change. Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. It’s a story about the power—and limitations—of art to create change, the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children, and how any of us can survive a broken world with our hearts intact.
From Our Book Lover-In-Chief
I was so invested in the future of this mother and son, and I can’t wait to hear what you think of this deeply suspenseful story.
The October 2022 @ReesesBookClub pick is Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng @pronounced_ing—our first ever double author pick! I absolutely loved catching up with Celeste to talk about her thought-provoking, heart-wrenching novel. It’s set in a not-too-distant future where entire sections of the population are deemed un-American and forced away from their families. It follows the story of a young boy named Bird on the search for his mother Margaret, a poet whose work was deemed unpatriotic. I was so invested in the future of this mother and son, and I can’t wait to hear what you think of this deeply suspenseful story!


FROM THE AUTHOR
Celeste Ng
Celeste Ng is the number one New York Times bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere. Her third novel, Our Missing Hearts, will be published in October 2022. Ng is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and her work has been published in over thirty languages.
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