What emerged is the book you hold in your hands. Can we actually make a difference? How can we teach our children to make the world better when we ourselves have failed to do so? The story shifted as I wrestled with questions raised by the reckonings taking place-or being avoided.

But as I wrote, the world began to shake along long-ignored fault lines, and the last few years have felt particularly cataclysmic. In mid-2016, after I finished drafting Little Fires Everywhere, I started what I thought was a fairly traditional novel about a mother and her adolescent son. It's a story about the power-and limitations-of art to create change, the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children, and how any of us can survive a broken world with our hearts intact. Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic-including the work of Bird's mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old.īird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems he doesn't know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn't wonder. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve 'American culture' in the wake of years of economic instability and violence.

Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library.

The missing hearts