Little Fires Everywhere

(Penguin, $27) A happy family’s handsome home burns to the ground in the opening pages of Celeste Ng’s “delectable and engrossing” new novel, said

in The Boston Globe. But the Richardsons feel they know the culprit and they have the means to bounce back, so we eagerly absorb the backstory of how these pillars of picturesque Shaker Heights, Ohio, became enmeshed in such upheaval. It’s more than coincidence, no doubt, that two tenants of the family vanished from a duplex across town on the same night. Ng soon flashes back to the arrival of 15-yearold Pearl Warren and her artist single mom, and the small suburban dramas that begin playing out are only “mildly involving,” said in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. But when a custody battle breaks out over a neighbor’s Chinese-American baby, characters are forced to choose sides, and Ng unfurls “a multilayered, tightly focused, and expertly plotted narrative.” A novel “about class and race, privilege and prejudice,” Little Fires Everywhere “has the power to provoke and entrance.”