The Sorrows of Others

is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her short stories have appeared in A Public Space, McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She is currently the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. The Sorrows of Others is her first book.

In New York City, an art student finds an unexpected subject when she moves in with a grandmother from Xi’an, and boundaries are put into question. When a newlywed couple moves to Arizona, adapting to unfamiliar customs keeps their marriage from falling apart. A woman grapples with what it means to care for another, and the limits of that care, when her dying husband returns from Beijing years after abandoning her. And during a rainy summer in Texas, a visitor exposes the unspoken but unburiable history that binds two families together. Ada Zhang writes with startling honesty and love about lives young and old, in a stunning debut that explores what happens when we leave home and what happens when we stay, and the selves we meet and shed in the process of becoming.