From the acclaimed author of This Place Is Still Beautiful comes an evocative, achingly romantic road-trip story about grief, diasporic identities, and the deep-buried secrets that haunt us, perfect for fans of Past Lives and The Farewell.
Stella Chen’s life ground to a halt when her brother unexpectedly passed away a year ago. Raised together by their grandmother for years in the Chinese countryside before rejoining their parents in the United States, his absence destroys the connective tissue in her family. With another jarring move her senior year, from rural Illinois to unfamiliar surroundings in San Diego, she is left alone and adrift in her family’s suffocating silence and the void of unanswered questions her brother left behind.
So when Stella’s parents force her to join her estranged childhood friend Alan Zhao for a college tour all over California, Stella dreads it. Alan is a reminder of everything Stella wishes she could be—popular, gregarious, unburdened—and a reminder of how lost she is.
As this road trip takes Stella and Alan down beautiful coastlines and through fraught family dynamics, Stella can’t help but feel the spark of why she and Alan were once so close. Before long, they find themselves pulled into each other’s orbits, forcing unspoken feelings and long-hidden truths into the light.
One car. Two childhood friends. A thousand miles of unspoken history.
- Childhood Friends to Lovers: Stella and Alan were once inseparable. Now they’re strangers sharing a car, and the silence is loaded with everything they’ve never said.
- Grief and Healing: A year after her brother’s death, Stella is navigating a world without him—and a family that refuses to speak his name.
- An Emotional Road Trip: From San Diego to the Bay Area, every mile forces Stella and Alan to confront their shared past and the unspoken feelings between them.
- Chinese American Experience: A poignant look at the immigrant experience, from a childhood in the Chinese countryside to the culture shock of rural Illinois, and the search for belonging.