Little Fires Everywhere

Little Fires Everywhere is Celeste Ng's 2017 novel, the second-book breakout that established Ng as one of the major contemporary literary-fiction writers of her generation. The setting is Shaker Heights, Ohio, the planned upper-middle-class Cleveland suburb where Ng herself grew up. The novel opens with the Richardson family home burning down in a fire deliberately set by the youngest Richardson daughter, Izzy, and then reconstructs the previous year leading up to the fire: the arrival of Mia Warren, an itinerant photographer, and her teenage daughter Pearl, who rent a duplex from the Richardsons, and the custody battle that erupts over a Chinese-American baby adopted by friends of the Richardsons against the wishes of the birth mother.

Ng's project is the careful construction of a multi-family social novel that takes seriously the question of who has the right to raise a child. The dual-perspective structure (Elena Richardson, the upper-middle-class lifelong Shaker Heights resident, versus Mia Warren, the working-class artist who has spent fifteen years moving from town to town with Pearl) is the engine of the novel's moral argument. The teenage chapters (Pearl with the Richardson children Lexie, Trip, Moody, and Izzy) carry the structural weight of the second half. The custody-trial chapters are rendered with the kind of patient ethical specificity that distinguishes Ng from the commercial-literary intersection she works in.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the right Ng entry point, and for fans of Ann Patchett's Commonwealth, Anne Tyler's Saint Maybe, and Jodi Picoult's Small Great Things who want the novel those books all reach toward. The 2020 Hulu adaptation with Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington is one of the strongest contemporary literary-fiction screen productions. Jennifer Lim's audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation. Read Our Missing Hearts (2022) next.