After the death of a cousin, Mei inherits a house in rural Ontario and begins sorting through what is left behind.

Boxes, photographs, clothes and household objects; these fragments form a family history, information found and worked through about migration, grief and gender, but never entirely resolved. Small Beauty is at its heart, attentive, attentive to the way a life persists in rooms and objects after the person attached to them has gone.

Mei’s relationship to her Chinese-Canadian family history sits alongside her experience as a trans woman without either becoming a tidy metaphor for the other. Identity within, emerges organically, through memory, domestic ritual, estrangement, desire, this material intelligence to it almost makes the house a second, parallel memory. Spare and intimate, a lovely read.

Edition: Brow Books, Australia, 2018. Paperback. Australian edition; originally published by Metonymy Press in Canada.