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Set in China and America, in the generations after the Cultural Revolution, The Sorrows of Others is a dazzling collection about people confronted with being outsiders—as immigrants, as revolutionaries, and even, often, within their own families.
In New York City, an art student finds an unexpected subject when she moves in with a grandmother from Xi’an, and boundaries are put into question. When a newlywed couple moves to Arizona, adapting to unfamiliar customs keeps their marriage from falling apart. A woman grapples with what it means to care for another, and the limits of that care, when her dying husband returns from Beijing years after abandoning her. And during a rainy summer in Texas, a visitor exposes the unspoken but unburiable history that binds two families together. Ada Zhang writes with startling honesty and love about lives young and old, in a stunning debut that explores what happens when we leave home and what happens when we stay, and the selves we meet and shed in the process of becoming.
I loved The Sorrows of Others, a luminous, moving collection of stories about love and family and belonging. Ada Zhang writes across generations with a rare sense of grace and precision. She is a young writer worth watching.
—Jess Walter, author of The Angel of Rome and Beautiful Ruins
Ada Zhang doesn’t balk at the big matters—revolution, immigration, family, love, marriage, affairs, divorce, death—but the profound mysteries you hear in her prose live between the notes you know. In these stories the little hollows at the heart of all our hopes pool with sorrow, and that sorrow weighs like a duty, as fierce and binding as love. The restraint in this collection is unlike anything in our rather noisy and obvious age. The Sorrows of Others is masterful.
—Charles D’Ambrosio, author of Loitering and The Dead Fish Museum
Each story in The Sorrows of Others is elegantly braided and brushed with a careful hand. This debut collection resists the temptations of flash and clamor, embracing a more modulated, substantial prose that resonates richly, with a deep understanding of character and of true mystery. Prepare to be ushered into the everyday fascinations of the various lives depicted here, and prepare at each story’s end to be left wondering and aching.
—Jamel Brinkley, author of A Lucky Man
Every once in a while, a new writer comes along whose stories are so naturally perceptive, empathetic, and intelligent that reading them feels like falling in love with the form all over again. The relationships Zhang’s characters navigate are full of quiet ardor and tangled duties; at the heart of each story is found an urgent, private world rendered with care and skill. Rare is it to encounter a young writer whose voice is so assured; rarer still is it to read one capable of such calm, humane wisdom. The Sorrows of Others announces Ada Zhang as a major literary talent, one anyone who loves reading should experience.
—Arna Bontemps Hemenway, author of Elegy on Kinderklavier
In these marvelous stories, Ada Zhang writes with ferocity and precision about feelings and situations I have seldom seen captured in fiction before: a woman caring for the dying husband who has abandoned her, a girl glimpsing what her grandparents have endured in China. Each story offers a deeply satisfying world, one I never wanted to leave. The Sorrows of Others is a brilliant debut.
—Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in the Field
These stories contain a rare and profound understanding of loneliness, in all its gestures, nuances, and variations: the loneliness of aging, of being othered, within families or in solitude, of a widower in Xi’an or a young professional in New York. Above all, Zhang has captured the essential loneliness of human interiority, the experience of being alone in one’s mind. Every story is written with grace and a light touch, scenes subtly washed with feeling as a skilled watercolorist floods a landscape with color. A wonderful debut.
—Kim Fu, author of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
The world of Ada Zhang is wise and patient in its understanding of the human soul—how tender it is, how resilient and capacious, harboring both darkness and light. In this wide-ranging collection, each story arrives carrying the treasures of entire lives lived. Zhang’s writing is transportive, timeless, and a pleasure to behold.
—Lucy Tan, author of What We Were Promised
To read Ada Zhang’s collection The Sorrows of Others is to be in sublime relationship to human follies and to wisdom and to the silence that is cultivated between lines and after a story ends. This is a collection to savor and to reread.
—Jai Chakrabarti, author of A Play for the End of the World
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ada Zhang is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her short stories have appeared in A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She grew up in Austin, Texas, and now lives in New York City where she is an associate editor at Running Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. The Sorrows of Others is her first book.