Central Places

A young woman's past and present collide when she brings her white fiance home to meet her Chinese immigrant parents in this vibrant debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.

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 fiance. 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?