Overview

In Chia-Chia Lin's debut novel, The Unpassing, we meet a Taiwanese immigrant family of five struggling to make ends meet in rural Alaska. The father, hardworking but beaten down, is employed as a plumber and repairman, while the mother, a loving, strong-willed, and unpredictably emotional matriarch, holds the house together. When eleven-year-old Gavin contracts meningitis at school, he falls into a deep, nearly fatal coma. He wakes up a week later to learn that his little sister Ruby was infected, too. She did not survive. Routine takes over for the grieving family: The siblings care for each other as they befriend a neighboring family and explore the woods; distance grows between the parents as they deal with their loss separately. But things spiral when the father, increasingly guilt ridden after Ruby's death, is sued for not properly installing a septic tank, which results in the death of a little girl. In the ensuing chaos, what really happened to Ruby finally emerges. With flowing prose that evokes the terrifying beauty of the Alaskan wilderness, Lin explores the fallout after the loss of a child and the way in which a family is forced to grieve in a place that doesn't yet feel like home. Emotionally raw and subtly suspenseful, The Unpassing is a deeply felt family saga that dismisses the American dream for a harsher, but ultimately more profound, reality.

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Reviews

In this spare, deeply felt debut novel, Lin resists received wisdom about the American dream to craft a family saga about the difficulty of grieving far from home. --Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire Chia-Chia Lin's The Unpassing is a searing, open wound of a book, marvelously alive and, quite simply, remarkable. Traversing the oftentimes brutal frontier of an isolated family living in an isolated environment, I can't think of another novel as of late that relentlessly tackles headlong our deepest struggles for a sense of place, of home, and belonging. How do we push through grief? How do we find peace with not only our loved ones but ourselves? What sacrifices must we endure for friendship and connection? This is a story for our times. And a story unlike any other. --Paul Yoon, author of The Mountain The Unpassing is a devastating debut, igneous, aching as if with the glow of the great northern skies beneath which it is set. More than meditation on grief; more than immigrant saga, or bildungsroman; more than new American gothic: here, Chia-Chia Lin has written a novel of such strange, brittle beauty as to resemble nothing else so much as living, itself. Her prose--at once poetic and lucid, by turns darkly comic and haunting--achieves something like the peculiar grammar of loss. I turned the last page with heartache and wonder, a feeling of having been undone and remade. --D. Wystan Owen, author of Other People's Love Affairs

Lin's attention to detail is startling, and though she keeps close to Gavin's childhood experience, she also allows us to read between the lines and intuit the depth of the family's grief, financial straits and fear of belittlement from their white neighbors and colleagues. Anyone who has ever grieved -- be it the loss of a person, home, country or security -- will feel a sense of recognition. The Unpassing is a remarkable, unflinching debut. --Ilana Masad, The Washington Post An arresting portrait of an immigrant family's pivotal moment of crisis . . . a nuanced portrayal of the American frontier . . . Lin's spare, lyric prose sets an elemental stage, a place indifferent to human suffering, cycling through life and death on a larger scale . . . Lin takes us through crisis and personal questioning, reminding us that we are closer to the brink than we'd like to admit . . . The Unpassing is a powerful debut from an author to watch. --K.B. Thors, San Francisco Chronicle [A] grim, breathtakingly beautiful debut novel . . . Lin excels when she gets small, with finely observed renderings of the family's surroundings . . . The way this chilling, captivating book concludes will delight as much as it challenges, offering as it does a blend of escape, tragedy, triumph, loss and what we've expected all along. --Nathan Deuel, The Los Angeles Times Harrowing . . . In lyrical, intimate prose, Lin reveals the harsh realities of working class life in 1980s Alaska and the failed promises of the American dream. --Thomas Gebremedhin, The Wall Street Journal Magazine In this spare, deeply felt debut novel, Lin resists received wisdom about the American dream to craft a family saga about the difficulty of grieving far from home. --Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire The Unpassing took me a while to get through, but not because I was bored. Because every single sentence was stunning . . . This isn't a page-turner. It's a full on page-savorer. --Mehera Bonner, Cosmopolitan (Best Books of May) A complicated and refreshingly unromantic family drama . . .One of the immediate pleasures of Lin's writing is the heightened perception it brings to [its] environments . . . At its heart, The Unpassing is about newcomers striving in the margins between civilization and the forest for a basic sense of security that others have long taken for granted. It's a kind of modern pioneer story, stripped of sentimentality but pulsating with both love and dread for the wilderness. --Charles Black, Outside Lin's evocative passages and brilliantly observed details place the reader in a landscape rendered at turns foreboding or desolate by the family's calamities. There is much to savor in her deft ability to conjure atmosphere. --YZ Chin, Electric Literature Stunning . . . With powerful and poetic prose, Lin captures the uncertainty and insight of childhood . . . Lin's majestic writing immerses the reader in the bodily experiences of her characters, who writhe, paw, dig, salivate, and draw readers into their world. --Maggie Taft, Booklist (starred review) Lin's talent for vivid, laser-sharp prose--especially when describing Alaska's stark beauty or the family's eccentric temperament--is undeniable. --Kirkus I can't stop thinking about The Unpassing. Chia-Chia Lin captures the strangeness and beauty of childhood better than any writer in recent memory, and she is a brilliant observer of physical and emotional landscapes. Readers should be excited: this debut novel, a true work of art, displays the kind of clear and uniquely-angled vision that announces the beginning of a remarkable career. --Jamel Brinkley, author of A Lucky Man The Unpassing is a breathtaking novel, full of characters as strong and as wild as the Alaskan landscape they inhabit. Sentence after gorgeous sentence, I was pulled into their eery and beautiful world. Chia-Chia Lin is a remarkable writer. --Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing Like the landscape it inhabits, this brilliant novel is composed of equal parts mystery, menace, and ravishment. It's difficult to think of another recent book in which emotion mounts so steadily and inexorably, nearly imperceptibly, until the last pages arrive with almost unbearable force. Chia-Chia Lin is among the best new writers I've read in years. --Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You Chia-Chia Lin's The Unpassing is a searing, open wound of a book, marvelously alive and, quite simply, remarkable. Traversing the oftentimes brutal frontier of an isolated family living in an isolated environment, I can't think of another novel as of late that relentlessly tackles headlong our deepest struggles for a sense of place, of home, and belonging. How do we push through grief? How do we find peace with not only our loved ones but ourselves? What sacrifices must we endure for friendship and connection? This is a story for our times. And a story unlike any other. --Paul Yoon, author of The Mountain The Unpassing is a devastating debut, igneous, aching as if with the glow of the great northern skies beneath which it is set. More than meditation on grief; more than immigrant saga, or bildungsroman; more than new American gothic: here, Chia-Chia Lin has written a novel of such strange, brittle beauty as to resemble nothing else so much as living, itself. Her prose--at once poetic and lucid, by turns darkly comic and haunting--achieves something like the peculiar grammar of loss. I turned the last page with heartache and wonder, a feeling of having been undone and remade. --D. Wystan Owen, author of Other People's Love Affairs

Harrowing . . . In lyrical, intimate prose, Lin reveals the harsh realities of working class life in 1980s Alaska and the failed promises of the American dream. --Thomas Gebremedhin, The Wall Street Journal Magazine In this spare, deeply felt debut novel, Lin resists received wisdom about the American dream to craft a family saga about the difficulty of grieving far from home. --Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire Stunning . . . With powerful and poetic prose, Lin captures the uncertainty and insight of childhood . . . Lin's majestic writing immerses the reader in the bodily experiences of her characters, who writhe, paw, dig, salivate, and draw readers into their world. --Maggie Taft, Booklist (starred review) Lin's talent for vivid, laser-sharp prose--especially when describing Alaska's stark beauty or the family's eccentric temperament--is undeniable. --Kirkus I can't stop thinking about The Unpassing. Chia-Chia Lin captures the strangeness and beauty of childhood better than any writer in recent memory, and she is a brilliant observer of physical and emotional landscapes. Readers should be excited: this debut novel, a true work of art, displays the kind of clear and uniquely-angled vision that announces the beginning of a remarkable career. --Jamel Brinkley, author of A Lucky Man The Unpassing is a breathtaking novel, full of characters as strong and as wild as the Alaskan landscape they inhabit.Sentence after gorgeous sentence, I was pulled into their eery and beautiful world. Chia-Chia Lin is a remarkable writer. --Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing Like the landscape it inhabits, this brilliant novel is composed of equal parts mystery, menace, and ravishment. It's difficult to think of another recent book in which emotion mounts so steadily and inexorably, nearly imperceptibly, until the last pages arrive with almost unbearable force. Chia-Chia Lin is among the best new writers I've read in years. --Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You Chia-Chia Lin's The Unpassing is a searing, open wound of a book, marvelously alive and, quite simply, remarkable. Traversing the oftentimes brutal frontier of an isolated family living in an isolated environment, I can't think of another novel as of late that relentlessly tackles headlong our deepest struggles for a sense of place, of home, and belonging. How do we push through grief? How do we find peace with not only our loved ones but ourselves? What sacrifices must we endure for friendship and connection? This is a story for our times. And a story unlike any other. --Paul Yoon, author of The Mountain The Unpassing is a devastating debut, igneous, aching as if with the glow of the great northern skies beneath which it is set. More than meditation on grief; more than immigrant saga, or bildungsroman; more than new American gothic: here, Chia-Chia Lin has written a novel of such strange, brittle beauty as to resemble nothing else so much as living, itself. Her prose--at once poetic and lucid, by turns darkly comic and haunting--achieves something like the peculiar grammar of loss. I turned the last page with heartache and wonder, a feeling of having been undone and remade. --D. Wystan Owen, author of Other People's Love Affairs

Author Information

Chia-Chia Lin is a graduate of Harvard College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She grew up in Pittsburgh and lives in San Francisco. The Unpassing is her first novel.

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