“Transplants is a gorgeously written, complex, and profoundly moving meditation on place, language, and belonging.”
—LAUREN GROFF, NYT bestselling author of The Vaster Wilds and Fates and Furies
“Daniel Tam-Claiborne is a remarkable talent telling stories that need to be told. Transplants is honest, gripping, and filled with beauty. It will transport you.”
—ANGIE KIM, NYT bestselling author of Happiness Falls and Miracle Creek
“Tightly woven and sparkling with detail, Transplants follows the journeys of two extraordinary women as they learn what it means to be their truest selves.”
—LISA KO, author of Memory Piece and The Leavers
“Transplants is that rare debut: intricate, ambitious, and beautifully realized.”
—DOMINIC SMITH, author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos and Return to Valetto
“Transplants rings with authenticity. Deeply affecting and compulsively readable, it captures the complexities of transnational life with wonderful fidelity. A remarkable debut.”
—GISH JEN, author of Thank You, Mr. Nixon and The Resisters
A harrowing and poignant novel following two young women in pursuit of kinship and self-discovery who yearn to survive in a world that doesn’t know where either of them belong.
On a university campus in rural Qixian, Lin and Liz make an improbable pair: Lin, a Chinese student closer to her menagerie of pets than to her peers, and Liz, a Chinese American teacher grieving her mother’s sudden death. They’re each met with hostility—Lin by her classmates, who mock her for dating a white foreigner; Liz by her fellow English teachers, who exploit their privilege—and forge an unlikely friendship.
After a startling betrayal that results in Lin’s expulsion, they swap places. Lin becomes convinced to pursue her degree at a community college near Liz’s Ohio hometown, while Liz searches for answers as to what drove her parents to leave China before she was born. But when a global catastrophe deepens the fissures between modern-day China and an increasingly fractured United States, Lin and Liz—far from home and estranged from themselves—are forced to confront both the familiar and the strange in each other.
Unspooling over the course of a single extraordinary year in our not-yet-distant past and in small towns from Dandong to Deadwood, Transplants is a piercing story of migration, belonging, and the parts of ourselves that get lost in translation. Alternating between Liz and Lin’s perspectives, it is a lyrical and moving exploration of race, love, power, and freedom that illuminates the limits and possibilities of what can happen when we open ourselves to the unknown and reveals how even our fiercest differences may bring us closer than we might ever imagine.