Book Discussion: Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

Copies of the book are available at the library, or in our library catalog in e-audiobook or e-book formats. This program is for adults. Registration is not required.

Join us for our September book club to discuss Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng.
Copies of the book are available at the library, or in our library catalog in e-audiobook or e-book formats. This program is for adults. Registration is not required.

From the number one bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere, a deeply suspenseful and heartrending novel about the unbreakable love between a mother and child in a society consumed by fear. Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in Harvard University's 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 drawn into a quest to find her. 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

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