A lyrical exploration of love, power, and freedom through the intertwined lives of two young women who yearn to survive in a world upended.
On a university campus in rural Qixian, Lin and Liz make an improbable pair: Lin, a Chinese student closer to her pets than to her peers, and Liz, a Chinese American teacher grieving her mother’s sudden death.
The two forge an unlikely friendship, but after a startling betrayal results in Lin’s expulsion, they swap places. Lin pursues her degree at a college near Liz’s Ohio hometown, while Liz strives to uncover what drove her parents to leave China before she was born. When suddenly a global catastrophe deepens the fissures between 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, from Dandong to Deadwood, Transplants is a piercing story of migration, identity, and belonging that reveals how even our fiercest differences can bring us closer together.
Early Praise for Transplants
“Transplants is a gorgeously written, complex, and profoundly moving meditation on place, language, and belonging. What an accomplished debut by Daniel Tam-Claiborne, whose brilliant voice we will certainly hear a great deal of in the future.”
—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 confront questions of family, country, and survival, and in doing so, learn what it means to be their truest selves.”
—LISA KO, author of Memory Piece and The Leavers
“A delicately braided story of two women and their searches for belonging within and across cultures, borders, and languages. 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
“Daniel Tam-Claiborne is a world-class advocate for Asian diasporic communities, connecting education with storytelling for social justice around the globe. Now his debut novel Transplants confronts the bloody fight for selfhood amidst transnational, linguistic, and racial borders. Tam-Claiborne brings us a pure gift—revealing humanity as a braid of destruction and restoration.”
—E. J. KOH, author of The Liberators and The Magical Language of Others