
In Silver Repetition, Lily Wang's endless, perfect loops of memory and dream, loss and return, combine to create a formally inventive coming-of-age novel. Told from the perspective of a young Asian immigrant thoughtfully navigating dual identities, grief, family, migration, and modern relationships, this is a novel infused with the rich language of a poet.
Having left China for Canada with her parents as a child, Yuè Yuè yearns to discover who she is as she nears the end of her undergraduate degree and starts a new relationship. In urgent poetic fragments, she seeks common ground with her Canadian-born younger sister and grieves the beloved cousin she lost touch with back home. After Yuè Yuè receives a call from a girl making accusations, her date ghosts her. Meanwhile, her mother's illness advances like snow. On a walk in the woods, Yuè Yuè sees a little girl digging in the mud, but when she peeks behind the curtain of black hair, her own face haunts her.
In a moving reunion, Yuè Yuè's cousin comes to visit and everyone is caught, laughing, in the rain. The novel shows how, despite the weight of grief, isolation, and difference, even the most delicate family bonds can knit together tightly enough for the future to overcome the past.
Lily Wang (they/them) was born in Shanghai in 1997 and moved to Canada in 2004. The author of the poetry collection Saturn Peach, they have an MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Toronto.
"[Silver Repetition] brims with delicate imagery and flights of imagination. . . . Wang convincingly portrays the bifurcation and complexity of their protagonist's mind."
--Publishers Weekly
"Ghostly, fishy, and deeply moving. With sensitivity and grace, Lily Wang captures all the fleeting and contradictory feelings that come from leaving one world behind and entering another. Family members are echo chambers, not empty but rather overflowing with the sounds and sensations of other moments, some mere seconds past, others distant and impossible."
--Larissa Lai, author of The Lost Century