Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng is an American writer whose parents emigrated to the United States from Hong Kong in the late 1960s. She was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. Her debut novel Everything I Never Told You achieved both commercial and critical success, becoming a New York Times best-seller as well as Amazon’s Best Book of the Year in 2014 and a New York Times Notable Book of 2014.

In his New York Times review, Alexander Chee judges that the book is a “literary thriller” with a “doubled heart.” Its mission is to be as exciting as a thriller while commenting on the integration of Chinese Americans in the 20th century, by telling “a story bigger than whatever is behind the crime.” Chee describes how Ng dangles two stock protagonists of the crime genre before the reader: the missing ingenue, Lydia Lee, and the local bad boy, Jack Wolff. However, when neither Lydia nor Jack nor the investigation into Lydia’s death prove to be what readers expect, Ng succeeds in creating an original narrative with an important message on how the White hegemony limits opportunities for minorities.