A scalding, darkly humorous debut following an enmeshed mother-daughter duo, both best friends and enemies, and the plastic surgery addiction that warps their lives into a perilous spiral
At twenty-six, Linli Feng is still trying to escape her mother Fanny’s orbit. But after three years of estrangement, just when Linli has been accepted into a prestigious graduate program, she is dragged back by Fanny’s latest medical catastrophe and forced to return home.
For decades, Fanny has been addicted to plastic surgery, getting bargain procedures in the basements of LA’s bootleg beauty industry. Now Fanny’s disfigured face is in dangerous revolt, infected and collapsing yet again from black-market injectables.
But even as Linli wades through the wreck of family finances and juggles her mother’s medical care, Fanny has another secret in store. Fanny has won a spot on America’s Beauty Extreme, a reality television competition in which botched plastic surgery addicts compete for reconstructive surgery as riveted audiences tune in. When Linli attempts to rescue Fanny from the sinister subculture that has already claimed her mother’s face, she must at last confront the corrosive reality of the American Dream that is at the fraught heart of their relationship.
Genre: Literary Fiction
At twenty-six, Linli Feng is still trying to escape her mother Fanny’s orbit. But after three years of estrangement, just when Linli has been accepted into a prestigious graduate program, she is dragged back by Fanny’s latest medical catastrophe and forced to return home.
For decades, Fanny has been addicted to plastic surgery, getting bargain procedures in the basements of LA’s bootleg beauty industry. Now Fanny’s disfigured face is in dangerous revolt, infected and collapsing yet again from black-market injectables.
But even as Linli wades through the wreck of family finances and juggles her mother’s medical care, Fanny has another secret in store. Fanny has won a spot on America’s Beauty Extreme, a reality television competition in which botched plastic surgery addicts compete for reconstructive surgery as riveted audiences tune in. When Linli attempts to rescue Fanny from the sinister subculture that has already claimed her mother’s face, she must at last confront the corrosive reality of the American Dream that is at the fraught heart of their relationship.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"If this terrifying era is going to produce a new canon of American immigration novels - and it should! - Sarah Wang's New Skin will be one of its indisputable masterpieces, a novel of unique brilliance, so beautiful, hilarious, heartbreaking, teeming with a gloriously searing rage but also tenderness." - Francisco Goldman
"Horror and coming-of-age genres wildly collide in Sarah Wang's inventive and brilliant debut novel New Skin. But her agenda is something more subtle: how do circumstance, culture and character combine to define us? Completely engaging, surprising and beautifully written, I couldn't stop reading." - Chris Kraus
"A blistering addition to the cannon of mother-daughter fiction. Out of the intimately known landscape of a mother's face and the estrangement of plastic surgery, Sarah Wang maps new territory for where daring, contemporary writing about family might go next. This is a phenomenal first novel not to be missed." - Idra Novey
"New Skin offers a brilliantly dark account of a mother and her daughter locked in a relationship with each other and the wider world that no amount of surgery can cure. Sarah Wang's novel is intense, engaging, original and hilarious." - Colm Tóibín
"New Skin holds almost all of womanhood: impossible beauty standards, the inverted mother-daughter bond, and an adulthood rooted in the endless negotiation between obligation and shared trauma. This dynamite book is unsparing and darkly funny. It asks why does leaving often mean staying, and why does self-preservation so often become self-destruction?" - Weike Wang
"Horror and coming-of-age genres wildly collide in Sarah Wang's inventive and brilliant debut novel New Skin. But her agenda is something more subtle: how do circumstance, culture and character combine to define us? Completely engaging, surprising and beautifully written, I couldn't stop reading." - Chris Kraus
"A blistering addition to the cannon of mother-daughter fiction. Out of the intimately known landscape of a mother's face and the estrangement of plastic surgery, Sarah Wang maps new territory for where daring, contemporary writing about family might go next. This is a phenomenal first novel not to be missed." - Idra Novey
"New Skin offers a brilliantly dark account of a mother and her daughter locked in a relationship with each other and the wider world that no amount of surgery can cure. Sarah Wang's novel is intense, engaging, original and hilarious." - Colm Tóibín
"New Skin holds almost all of womanhood: impossible beauty standards, the inverted mother-daughter bond, and an adulthood rooted in the endless negotiation between obligation and shared trauma. This dynamite book is unsparing and darkly funny. It asks why does leaving often mean staying, and why does self-preservation so often become self-destruction?" - Weike Wang
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