This month, we’re reading two novels by Asian American writers that question the promise and perils of starting over in America.
A New Skin: A Novel
Sarah Wang (Jr., Brown and Company, 320 pp., $29, May 2026)
This month, we’re reading two novels by Asian American writers that question the promise and perils of starting over in America.
A New Skin: A Novel
Sarah Wang (Jr., Brown and Company, 320 pp., $29, May 2026)
Botox injections it is to be normal among American women. If anything can stop this trend, it might be Sarah Wang’s debut novel, New Skin. This book paints a frighteningly sly picture of the US plastic surgery scene that can serve as an insult to anyone considering such procedures.
New Skin begins when 26-year-old Linli Feng returns to his hometown of Los Angeles to take care of his mother, Fan-Ju, or Fanny. Fanny, an immigrant from Taiwan, is heartbroken and addicted to plastic surgery. “My mother was parts artificial and human,” Linli says. “The different aesthetic goals of many doctors had made her face a battlefield of conflicting values.” Fanny’s obsession with fillers and skin bleaching causes her various health problems, and Linli must give up her professional ambitions to deal with them.
Things take a turn for the worse when FBI agents arrive at the Fengs’ door with news: Fanny has been indicted. The US government claims that Fanny is part of an investigation into a widespread network of “illegal cosmetic injections” involving Asian women in Los Angeles. Fanny may have been injected with “something like construction grade polymer,” among other things. Meanwhile, Fanny secretly applies—and is accepted—to appear as a contestant Extreme American Beautyreality television show where contestants with botched plastic surgery compete to win a reconstructive procedure.
Fanny’s suffering is so ridiculous New Skin It must take a caustic tone and humor. A novel that would otherwise be a heart-wrenching mother-daughter saga about the Asian American immigrant experience can’t do much else if it’s framed as “the dirtiest show on TV.”
As Fanny wanders around the reality TV house with her fellow contestants—who failed to pull off a Brazilian butt job, Wang leaves no stone unturned to explain—Linli struggles to uncover more about her mother’s alleged crimes. He also learns something about himself: For the first time, he misses his mother. Linli worked for several years to leave Los Angeles and Fanny. But “(w)ith the private war that my mother and I waged against each other, no outsiders would survive if they attacked one of us,” Linli decides.
Home alone, Linli begins to understand her mother’s life as a poor and previously undocumented immigrant, as well as a single mother. Fanny’s obsession with plastic surgery becomes exactly that—a physical manifestation of the deep psychological and systemic battles she has faced throughout her life. “What if my mother never left Taiwan?,” Linli asks. “He was complaining about how stupid Americans were, how rude and selfish they were.”
Throughout the novel, Wang refers to historical influences such as Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, the Feng family’s journey from their native Hubei province to Taiwan, and the Taiwanese factories and California nail salons that Fanny worked in before getting her green card. Fanny, Linli, and their community constantly fear raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as well as changes to their Medi-Cal services.
By the time Fanny returns from her reality TV show, Linli has gained a deeper understanding of her mother’s plight, as well as a new anger at how America has managed to exploit her. As a “new immigrant,” Linli recalls, Fanny was guided by “the belief that if she looked good, her life would be good.”—Linli.Allison Meakem
Babylon, South Dakota: A Novel
Tom Lin (Jr., Brown and Company, 336 pp., $30, May 2026)
Tom Lin’s second novel Babylon, South Dakota it’s so conceptually vast, so imaginatively drawn, that after finishing it, it’s hard to believe it clocks in at less than 350 pages. This remarkable, written book is at once a haunted house mystery, a geopolitical thriller, a multigenerational immigrant saga, the fragmentation of the American dream, and a meditation on longing and death.
In the years after the Cultural Revolution, a Chinese couple arrives in the windswept plains of the American Midwest to start anew on a 160-acre farm. Their one suitcase and briefcase contain only a few things—perhaps most important, a small silk bag of seeds from chrysanthemums that once grew in the yard of the husband’s childhood home, flowers that “were burned and burned the night the men—boys, really—had broken down their gates, denounce it, and condemn it.” (Even violence is made beautiful in Lin’s prose.)
Despite the impossibility of these fragile tea flowers thriving in the harsh South Dakotan climate, a few survive the first frost under the husband’s tender care, and soon, their hybrids cover the field, blooming nonstop and growing like weeds. Early on, chrysanthemums are aligned with the lunar calendar, but over the decades, they take on their own rhythms, even developing resistance to pesticides and years of drought.
If the chrysanthemums feel an Arcadian touch, the outside world intervenes in this idyll: Soon after the Hsiu family settles down, the US military identifies part of their land as a second missile site. Men from the nearby base of “Babylon” – that biblical symbol of depression and human depravity – arrive to build and repair a silo, which turns out to be not only a warhead but also a device capable of making the US nuclear program infallible. The explanation of this tool, which is reverse engineered from Chinese technology, is as labyrinthine as the logic of the block itself. Tragedy occurs when personal and geographic conflicts occur.
Lin, who left China for the United States at the age of 4, captures the impossibility of a private life isolated from the realities of borders and the mechanics of government and empire. This does not mean that Babylon, South Dakota it is dominated by some kind of disaster or hopelessness. In the world of the novel, outside forces bring magic just as they spell bad luck. By the end of the book, unlike Hsius, those impossible chrysanthemums have taken root in the earth, deeper than anyone imagined, growing “so low and strong where they were first cut that they could just be left alone.” – Jn.Chloe Hadavas
Deliverable, Briefly
Scottish author Ali Smith’s view of homonyms brings us Glyphmonitoring of Glyphwhich we raved about last year. Djamel White makes his debut with All Dogsa literary crime thriller set in the underbelly of Dublin. In John of JohnBooker Prize winner Douglas Stuart brings to life a remote island in the Outer Hebrides. Choi Jin-young’s cult classic about the horror of consumerism, Hungrytranslated from Korean by Soje. Dunkin’s business, the world of finance, and the Muslim concept of destiny come together in Hafeez Lakhani’s book. Plural.
Luxury developments in Lagos, Nigeria, are not what they seem at ‘Pemi Aguda’s. One Foot on Earth. Marlen Haushofer’s 1952 novel Year Fivewhich has now been translated into English by Shaun Whiteside, offers an opportunity for post-war Austria. Ecuadorian writer Mónica Ojeda Electric Shamans at the Sun Festivaltranslated by Sarah Booker, revels in retro-futuristic raucous ensemble. Tove Ditlevsen’s last novel, Wilhelm’s roomfirst published in 1975, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. And Hollywood filmmaking about the Troubles doesn’t work well in Seamas O’Reilly’s film Prestige drama.-CH
