Celeste Ng with Maggie Levine, Our Missing Hearts

Porter Square Books is thrilled to host the launch event for Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts at the Brattle Theatre on Sunday, October 2 at 3pm! Join us at this special pre-publication event to celebrate the book of which Booklist writes in a starred review: “[it] arguably achieves literary perfection.”

Boston Public Library librarian Maggie Levine will join the author in conversation, and a signing line will follow the talk during which you can get your copy of Our Missing Hearts personalized and up to 2 backlist titles signed.

This event is ticketed, and tickets can be purchased below. Each ticket will include entry for one to the event and one signed copy of Our Missing Hearts.

Want a signed copy, but aren’t able to attend the event? You can order one at this link by October 2 and we’ll get a copy signed at the event for you!

“As lyrical as it is chilling, as astonishing as it is empathic, Our Missing Hearts arguably achieves literary perfection.”  —Booklist (starred review)

From the number one bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere, a deeply suspenseful and heartrending novel about the unbreakable love between a mother and child in a society consumed by fear

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. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. 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. 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.

Bird 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. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. 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.

Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. 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.

Celeste Ng is the author of three novels, Everything  I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts. Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She graduated from Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan).  Her fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, and many other publications, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors.

Maggie Levine has been a children’s librarian at the Boston Public Library since 2012. In her free time, she enjoys sewing, phone banking, and canvassing. She lives in Roxbury with her husband and son, and is a new enthusiast about commuting by bike.