Our Debut Author Spotlite features debut books of all genres by authors living in Canada. Our goal is to spotlight their stories and help Canadian and Indigenous authors connect with readers from around the world.
Born in Shanghai, Linda Rui Feng has lived in San Francisco, New York, and Toronto. She is a graduate of Harvard and Columbia Universities and is currently a professor of Chinese cultural history at the University of Toronto. She has been twice awarded a MacDowell Fellowship for her fiction, and her prose and poetry have appeared in journals such as The Fiddlehead, The Kenyon Review, Santa Monica Review, and Washington Square Review. Swimming Back to Trout River is her first novel.
Visit the author’s website to learn more.
From the publisher: 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.
Raves
Ann Y.K. Choi, author
“An impressive and thoroughly satisfying debut. This book offers profound insight into human longing: how lives become intertwined and complicated by desire, fear, and memory. Music and its riveting power connects Feng’s characters through space and time. The period details are seamlessly woven, resulting in a beautifully crafted work of art with a story that will linger long after the turning of the final page.”
The Toronto Star
“A lyrical debut novel set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution that follows a father’s quest to reunite his family before his precocious daughter’s momentous birthday.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a husband and wife are afraid to share their deepest longings and regrets. With disarmingly quiet prose, Feng digs beneath Cassia’s and Momo’s reluctance to mine their emotional depths as they struggle to grasp their individual experiences as well as their fractured relationship. Filled with tragedy yet touched with life-affirming passion.”
Return to the Debut Author Spotlite List
Writers In Trees 