Shaker Heights, Ohio, is an idyllic, affluent suburban estate, where everything is planned and everyone lives in sync. Mrs. Richardson is a force at the centre of this golden community but when bohemian artist Mia and her daughter Pearl arrive in town, and move into a house owned by the Richardsons, the two families, who couldn’t be more different, slowly become intertwined as a variety of bonds and clashes are born. When elements of their past and present worlds collide, and an adoption case at the heart of the community elicits passionate responses from all sides, we are led towards a dramatic finale with devastating consequences.

As the book opens, Mrs Richardson stands on her perfect lawn watching her house burning. The story then steps back in time to explore the events leading up to this fire. There are a lot of characters in this book and Ng delves into many of their stories: the two main families, including the four Richardson children, and several key supporting characters. In some ways, they almost seem cast to specifically fill a stereotypical role – the jock, the black sheep, the bohemian artist, the perfect suburban wife, the immigrant etc. – but things are never this straightforward and, for the most part, the characters become so well developed, and multi-layered, that it’s easy to read beyond this. Many themes are touched on and there are lessons to be learned at every corner, as we watch our cast of characters, flawed in so many ways, make so many dubious choices, each questionable decision propelling the story closer to its climactic conclusion.

Ng has woven a sharply observed social critique with a deep dive into motherhood and family, in which every character has a pivotal role to play. Exploring themes of family, motherhood, mother-daughter relationships and the choices mothers make; the complexities of adolescence; race, class, privilege and prejudice; social conformity and life outside these lines; how the decisions we make shape our lives and to what extent past mistakes can be forgiven; and the lengths that our own insecurities and sense of self-righteousness can drive us too. This was a book that was passed on to me, that I mightn’t necessarily have picked out for myself, but I really enjoyed it and found myself hooked til the end.

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Little Fires Everywhere was published in 2017 by Penguin.

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Celeste Ng is the author of three novels, Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts. Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She graduated from Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan).  Her fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, and many other publications, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. Full bio here.