IN PERSON - Ada Zhang - THE SORROWS OF OTHERS

Brazos Bookstore will host Ada Zhang in person on Wednesday, May 24 at 6:30pm.

Ada Zhang will be in conversation with Chris Cander. 

Set in China and America, in the generations after the Cultural Revolution, The Sorrows of Others is a dazzling collection about people confronted with being outsiders--as immigrants, as revolutionaries, and even, often, within their own families.  

In New York City, an art student finds an unexpected subject when she moves in with a grandmother from Xi'an, and boundaries are put into question. When a newlywed couple moves to Arizona, adapting to unfamiliar customs keeps their marriage from falling apart. A woman grapples with what it means to care for another, and the limits of that care, when her dying husband returns from Beijing years after abandoning her. And during a rainy summer in Texas, a visitor exposes the unspoken but unburiable history that binds two families together. Ada Zhang writes with startling honesty and love about lives young and old, in a stunning debut that explores what happens when we leave home and what happens when we stay, and the selves we meet and shed in the process of becoming.

The Sorrows of Others has been selected for the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 series by Jamil Jan Kochai. 

Ada Zhang is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her short stories have appeared in A Public Space, McSweeney's, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She grew up in Austin, Texas, and now lives in New York City. The Sorrows of Others is her first book.  

Chris Cander is the USA Today bestselling author of The Weight of a Piano, which was named an Indie Next Great Read in both hardcover and paperback and which the New York Times called, “immense, intense and imaginative,” Whisper Hollow, also named an Indie Next Great Read, and 11 Stories, named by Kirkus as one of the best books of 2013 and winner of the Independent Publisher Book Awards for fiction.  Her most recent novel, A Gracious Neighbor, was released in July 2022.  Cander’s fiction has been published in twelve languages. She lives in her native Houston with her husband and two children.