Central Places

About the book

A TIMES BOOK OF THE MONTH AND STYLIST BOOK OF THE WEEK
A BAD FORM REVIEW PAPERBACK BOOK OF THE MONTH

'Sharp, swiftly moving, darkly funny . . . [a] compassion filled delight' The Times

'[A] sharp, assured debut' Daily Mail

'A sensitive, sharp-eyed, slyly funny novel of venturing back into the foreign country that is your past- and discovering that you can never really shake the places and people that shaped you' Celeste Ng, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Our Missing Hearts

'Delia Cai fully renders the uneasy marriage between past and present. Central Places is honest about the strangeness and revelation of returning home' Raven Leilani, New York Times bestselling author of Luster

Audrey Zhou left Hickory Grove, the tiny central Illinois town where she grew up, as soon as high school ended, and she never looked back. She moved to New York City and became the person she always wanted to be, complete with a high-paying, high-pressure job and a seemingly faultless fiancé. But if she and Manhattan-bred Ben are to build a life together, in the dream home his parents will surely pay for, Audrey can no longer hide him, or the person she's become, from those she left behind.

But returning to Hickory Grove is . . . complicated. Over the course of one disastrous week, Audrey's proximity to her family and to Kyle, her unrequited high school crush, forces her to confront the past and reexamine her fraught connection to her roots before she undoes everything she's worked toward and everything she's imagined for herself. But is that life really the one she wants?