What happens when an ambitious and successful twenty-something is forced to start over? She moves in with mom. At 28, Kathleen Cheng is back home in her childhood bedroom in Oakland, expecting to find her single mother as she’s always known her: depressed and desperate to return to China. Instead, her mother Marissa is like a renovated version of herself, unexpectedly sporty, pert, happy, and worst of all, in love. More about this book >

• HONOREE 5 Under 35 2023 >

  Selected by Kirstin Valdez Quade >

  Kirstin Valdez Quade

  

  Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of The Five Wounds, which won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Lambda Literary Award. She was a 2014 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree for her story collection, Night at the Fiestas, which won the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, the New York Times, and elsewhere. She teaches at Princeton University and in September will join the faculty of the Stanford University Creative Writing Program. (Photo credit: Holly Andres)