June’s Featured Author: Celeste Ng
Celeste Ng is the award-winning author of two novels, Everything I Never Told You (2014) and Little Fires Everywhere (2017), which have taken the world by storm. This June, if you are a bookworm and subscribed to our “Surprise Me” category, you will be receiving the famous novel Little Fires Everywhere.
Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. Ng’s parents moved from Hong Kong to the US in the 1960s. Her father was a physicist who worked for NASA, her mother, a chemist, and her older sister became an engineer. Ng is a Harvard graduate, where she studied English and earned a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Celeste has always loved reading and even told her fans on a book tour that her favorite book growing up was Harriet the Spy. Now her favorite book is The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.
Ng describes her writing and says, “I have an interest in the outsider. In fiction, you’re not often writing about the typical; you are interested in the outliers, the point of interest. Part of it comes from feeling I was the only Asian or person of color… another part comes from my personality: I’m an introvert, and my usual survival mode in a large group is to stand by a wall and watch everybody.”
Little Fires Everywhere, one of the books in our “Surprise Me” category, is set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where Celeste once lived. It follows two families, one a mother and daughter, that challenge the boundaries in the town. For three weeks in April 2020, the book was #1` on The New York Times fiction bestseller list. The novel has now been developed into a Hulu miniseries starring and executive produced by Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. Ng served as a producer of the show.
Celeste’s first novel, Everything I Never Told You, is about a mixed Chinese-American family whose middle daughter, Lydia, is found drowned in a lake. Ng spent six years writing the novel, going through four different full drafts. The book topped Amazon’s Best Books of the Year list for 2014.
If you haven’t already, it’s time to sign up for a monthly subscription with BookCase.Club! If you love books and do not have a preference for the genre, sign up for the “Surprise Me!” category. Every month, you will get two books within your favorite genre shipped right to your door. The best part- it’s only $9.99 per month. This month in the “Surprise Me!” category, you will be able to join the worldwide trend of reading Little Fires Everywhere! When you finish reading, make sure to watch the story come to life with the Hulu miniseries.
