Duets

From the award-winning author of Ghost Forest comes a playful and luminous meditation on the people we’re meant to meet.

I went to see a fortune teller to ask when I would find love.

Ada is twenty-four, living abroad on a temporary work visa, and ready to fall in love. She begins dating in earnest, relaying her misadventures to her friends and curating what she tells her mother and grandmother when she Skypes with them in Hong Kong. But they are keeping secrets of their own—her grandmother has had a stroke, creating new tensions on top of old wounds.

As Ada is moved to ask why love, for her, has always been braided with worry, her search for romance opens into a profound meditation on the many faces of devotion: the complicated loyalties of family, the magnetic pull of absent lovers, and the strange way we rehearse heartbreak long before it arrives. What begins as an effervescent and playful account of modern intimacy deepens into a tender exploration of the ties we choose, the bonds we inherit, and the unseen forces that draw us toward those we are destined to lose our hearts to, if only for a brief time.

Written with sly humor and an open heart in spare yet expansive prose, Duets is a radiant novel about a woman learning how to live—and love—fully.