Hi everyone, welcome to the Book Review Podcast. I'm Gilbert Cruz, the new editor of the

Bookstest here at the New York Times. And for the next many months we'll be highlighting

great conversations from our Decade Plus archive. We're planning a new iteration of this

podcast, and as a result we're going to take a while to figure out what that might sound

like. Until then, we hope you enjoy these trips down memory lane.

Celeste Ng's new novel, our missing hearts, takes place in a United States where certain books

are destroyed. Asian Americans face constant violence and children are taken away from

families who speak out against the government. It feels far off, but not so far off. As Stephen

King writes in his review of Ng's book, her dystopia feels milder than in books like 1984

or the Handmaid's Tale. The effect, quote, makes it more believable and hence more upsetting.

This week we're rerunning Ng's appearance from 2017 on the podcast, when she spoke to

us for the release of her last novel, Little Fires Everywhere.

Celeste, thank you for being here. Thank you so much for having me.

Tell us a little bit about the novel, but let's start with the title, which comes from a quote

from the book.

Yeah, the title, Little Fires Everywhere is both metaphorical and literal. There are quite

a number of metaphorical fires burning in the neighborhood and in between these two

families that sort of get entangled with each other. But the book actually opens with a

literal house fire. The house of the Richardson is one of the main families and the book is

burning to the ground and they find out soon that the youngest child, Izzy, has that

fire? So it's interesting because your first book,

everything I never told you, your debut, began with a dead girl and you were sort of trying

...