In this collection of linked stories, Jenny Zhang writes through the lives of Chinese-American girls growing up in New York in the 1990s.

A lot follows children crowded into small apartments, absorbing their parents’ sacrifices, resentments and unfinished histories while trying to invent selves that belong to neither family mythology nor the surrounding culture. The stories move between daughters, cousins, friends and mothers, building a communal portrait rather than arranging immigrant experience into one clean, exemplary narrative.

Zhang’s narrators are volatile, cruel, funny, needy and furiously perceptive. Their language runs hot—childhood fantasy, bodily disgust, sexual curiosity, jealousy and family intimacy all pressed together until tenderness becomes difficult to separate from violence. Sour Heart refuses the polished uplift often demanded of immigrant fiction. It is interested instead in what poverty and displacement do inside a household: how love becomes obligation, how gratitude curdles, and how children learn to use language both as camouflage and as a weapon.

Bloomsbury Circus, 2017. First UK edition, first printing. Paperback. Very good condition with light shelf and handling wear; internally clean.