Harvard Book Store Virtual Event: Linda Rui Feng

presenting Swimming Back to Trout River: A Novel
in conversation with WEIKE WANG

Harvard Book Store’s virtual event series and GrubStreet welcome LINDA RUI FENG—acclaimed writer and professor of Chinese cultural history at the University of Toronto—for a discussion of her debut novel, Swimming Back to Trout River. She will be joined in conversation by WEIKE WANG, author of the award-winning novel Chemistry.

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About Swimming Back to Trout River

How many times in life can we start over without losing ourselves?

In the summer of 1986, in a small Chinese village, ten-year-old Junie receives a momentous letter from her parents, who had left for America years ago: her father promises to return home and collect her by her twelfth birthday. But Junie’s growing determination to stay put in the idyllic countryside with her beloved grandparents threatens to derail her family’s shared future.

What Junie doesn’t know is that her parents, Momo and Cassia, are newly estranged from one another in their adopted country, each holding close private tragedies and histories from the tumultuous years of their youth during China’s Cultural Revolution. While Momo grapples anew with his deferred musical ambitions and dreams for Junie’s future in America, Cassia finally begins to wrestle with a shocking act of brutality from years ago. In order for Momo to fulfill his promise, he must make one last desperate attempt to reunite all three members of the family before Junie’s birthday—even if it means bringing painful family secrets to light.

Swimming Back to Trout River weaves together the stories of Junie, Momo, Cassia, and Dawn—a talented violinist from Momo’s past—while depicting their heartbreak and resilience, tenderly revealing the hope, compromises, and abiding ingenuity that make up the lives of immigrants. Feng’s debut is “filled with tragedy yet touched with life-affirming passion” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), and “Feng weaves a plot both surprising and inevitable, with not a word to spare” (Booklist, starred review).

Praise for Swimming Back to Trout River

“Linda Rui Feng’s Swimming Back to Trout River is a beautifully written, poignant exploration of family, art, culture, immigration and most of all, love. I was swept away by Feng’s fierce intelligence and keen insight even as her characters captured my heart with their tender hopes and bold actions. A gorgeous book that I couldn’t put down.” —Jean Kwok, author of Searching for Sylvie Lee

“What can account for the astonishing emotional force of this debut novel? Maybe it’s that Linda Rui Feng understands her characters with an intimacy one seldom encounters, or the sense one has that she loves them so much. Or maybe it’s Feng’s exceedingly rare gift for putting language to feelings so profound, and so exquisitely observed, that they escape all readymade names. Everything in this gorgeously orchestrated novel surprises, everything outraces expectation. Swimming Back to Trout River is one of the most beautiful debuts I have read in years.” —Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You

“Swimming Back to Trout River is notable for the grace of its prose and the harmony of its intertwined narratives, but the essential ‘beat’ of this wonderful fiction is the heartbeat of its characters, so richly and lovingly brought to life.” —Peter Ho Davies, author of The Fortunes