On the night of the Tiananmen Square massacre, a woman gives birth alone in a Beijing hospital. So begins the slow unravelling of Su Lan: a woman determined to remake herself, an ambitious physicist and ambivalent mother who becomes consumed by her research into disproving the irreversibility of time. Following Su Lan's sudden death, her daughter Liya travels from the US to China to try to understand the silences and ghosts her mother left behind. Adrift in a country she doesn't know, Liya begins to piece together how her mother's obsessive desire to erase her own past has marked the lives of those around her, and Liya's own.

"Jin's richly textured, unsparing writing questions whether a self can exist unmarked by the past" - New Yorker

"Little Gods expands the future of the immigrant novel" - New York Times Book Review

"It's a page-turner - but all the while it winks, reminding us that possible explanations in our universe are as varied as the beings who populate it" - Paris Review

"Artfully composed and emotionally searing, Jin's debut about lost girls, bottomless ambition, and the myriad ways family members can hurt and betray one another is gripping from beginning to end. This is a beautiful, intensely moving debut" - Publisher's Weekly

"Jin's debut is at heart a mystery, as a young Chinese American woman returns to China to try to understand her recently deceased mother's decisions and to find her biological father... Su Lan is a fascinating character of a type rarely seen in fiction, an ambitious woman whose intellect and drive allow her to envision changing the very nature of time" - Kirkus Reviews

"With precocious dexterity, Jin... adroitly privileges her readers with a haunting omniscience she denies her characters... Skilfully revealed, exquisitely rendered, Jin's first novel undoubtedly presages future success" - Booklist, Starred Review

"Spectacular and emotionally polyphonic... What makes Little Gods extraordinary is the way it examines not only the trajectory of its characters' lives but also their emotional motivations... That Jin has managed to craft such an intimate, emotionally complex story is an awesome achievement. That she managed to do it in her debut novel, doubly so" - Bookpage, Starred Review

"Little Gods is an intelligent, somewhat restrained look at the effects that tectonic political shifts have on ordinary citizens, effects that reverberate across the decades, and for its young American protagonist, even across oceans" - San Francisco Chronicle

"Little Gods marks a bold first step for a novelist who promises to give us even finer work in the future" - Washington Post

"Brilliant... Elegantly written, emotionally compelling, and thought provoking on every page... It is a masterfully crafted story about the gravity of the past, that unceasing pull towards a thing at once hidden and all encompassing" - The Millions

"Weaving the past and present, Little Gods is a haunting tale of love, ambition, and family" - Electric Literature

"Ambitious... a surprising and wrenching tale... Little Gods is built from familiar tropes: loves amid violence, lost parents, secrets held by those closest to us. But Jin brings a fresh imagination to them" - USA Today

"Meng Jin has crafted a complex and layered text, sparse yet lyrical" - Wasafiri