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Bestiary

Written by: K-Ming Chang
Narrated by: Catherine Ho, Nancy Wu, Ren Hanami
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Publisher's Summary

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE •

Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this spellbinding, visceral debut about one family’s queer desires, violent impulses, and buried secrets.

“Gorgeous and gorgeously grotesque.... Every line of this sensuous, magical-realist marvel is utterly alive.” (O: The Oprah Magazine)

FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY O: The Oprah Magazine • NPR • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews  

One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman’s body. She was called Hu Gu Po, and she hungered to eat children, especially their toes. Soon afterward, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her grandmother; a visiting aunt arrives with snakes in her belly; a brother tests the possibility of flight. All the while, Daughter is falling for Ben, a neighborhood girl with strange powers of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother’s letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies a myth - and that she will have to bring her family’s secrets to light in order to change their destiny.

With a poetic voice of crackling electricity, K-Ming Chang is an explosive young writer who combines the wit and fabulism of Helen Oyeyemi with the subversive storytelling of Maxine Hong Kingston. Tracing one family’s history from Taiwan to America, from Arkansas to California, Bestiary is a novel of migration, queer lineages, and girlhood.

Praise for Bestiary

“[A] vivid, fabulist debut...the prose is full of imagery. Chang’s wild story of a family’s tenuous grasp on belonging in the U.S. stands out with a deep commitment to exploring discomfort with the body and its transformations.” (Publishers Weekly)

©2020 K-Ming Chang (P)2020 Random House Audio

What the critics say

“Its prose is relentlessly, ruthlessly corporeal, and it is fearlessly beautiful. Told from the point of view of Daughter, a Taiwanese American early-adolescence girl, the book deftly threads together three generations of women with each other, land, water, trauma, violence, and love...." (Lambda Literary

“A visceral book that promises a major new literary voice.” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)

"[A] vivid, fabulist debut ... the prose is full of imagery. Chang’s wild story of a family’s tenuous grasp on belonging in the U.S. stands out with a deep commitment to exploring discomfort with the body and its transformations.” (Publishers Weekly)

What listeners say about Bestiary

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