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The exquisite debut novel by poet Fiona Sze-Lorrain has now arrived. Dear Chrysanthemums achieves the aesthetic ambitions of a novel with lyrical prose and imagery. Of course literature isn't just symbolism or allegorical truth; it also imparts cultural history, reveals its passage. Through plot and narrative in this novel, Sze-Lorrain probes into our complex, volatile society, expressing her thought and lucidity. Ma Jian, author of China Dream, The Dark Road, and Beijing Coma  

I read this book with my heart in my throat. Taken one by one, each of these delectable stories offers an intimate, sensuous portrait of the life of otherwise mysterious girls and women, their desires and obsessions and griefs. Taken as a whole, the novel is a heady, energetic, global mosaic that conveys just how deeply one human soul can relate to another. Susanna Daniel, author of Sea Creatures and Stiltsville

Just beneath the precisely-rendered quotidian world of these linked narratives lies a fathomless well of menace. Given this, Sze-Lorrain seems to ask, what are life’s chances? Frederick Turner, author of The Go-Between: A Novel of the Kennedy Years and 1929: A Novel of the Jazz Age

Dear Chrysanthemums weaves together the stories of Asian women whose lives are shaped, with and without their knowledge, by the storm of history and cultural upheaval. The political is always personal in this remarkable debut, in which the practice of art—dance, music, writing, even the art of cooking—is opposed to oppression, violence, loneliness, displacement, and death. With uncompromising detail, in language that is at once precise and evocative, author Sze-Lorrain takes us inside the individual struggles of her characters to reveal fascinating patterns of connection and hidden truth. Mary Helen Stefaniak, author of The World of Pondside and The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia

How can a book be simultaneously so beautiful and so heartbreaking? Dear Chrysanthemums explores the repercussions of the major events of modern Chinese history—the Chinese civil war, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square massacre—as they echo throughout lives in the diaspora. Sze-Lorrain’s storytelling is graceful yet fierce—this is an important novel about histories that have changed the world. Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Green Island and Water Ghosts

In Dear Chrysanthemums, Fiona Sze-Lorrain collects the shards of modern Chinese history and builds a prismatic, gorgeously intimate story of women who face impossible choices and losses in order to survive. Unflinching and haunting, the novel is a vivid portrayal of disillusionment and exile. Step by step, Sze-Lorrain constructs an intricate and deeply moving web that will leave you stunned by the end. Tsering Yangzom Lama, author of We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, shortlisted for the 2022 Giller Prize

Longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

Dear Chrysanthemums (Scribner, 2023)