All the Way Around the Sun, XiXi Tian
All the Way Around the Sun, XiXi Tian
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All the Way Around the Sun

Author: XiXi Tian

Narrator: Siu-See Hung

Unabridged: 7 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/30/2025

Synopsis

From the acclaimed author of This Place Is Still Beautiful comes an evocative, achingly romantic road-trip story about grief, diasporic identities, and the deep-buried secrets that haunt us, perfect for fans of Past Lives and The Farewell.Stella Chen’s life ground to a halt when her brother unexpectedly passed away a year ago. Raised together by their grandmother for years in the Chinese countryside before rejoining their parents in the United States, his absence destroys the connective tissue in her family. With another jarring move her senior year, from rural Illinois to unfamiliar surroundings in San Diego, she is left alone and adrift in her family’s suffocating silence and the void of unanswered questions her brother left behind.So when Stella’s parents force her to join her estranged childhood friend Alan Zhao for a college tour all over California, Stella dreads it. Alan is a reminder of everything Stella wishes she could be—popular, gregarious, unburdened—and a reminder of how lost she is.As this road trip takes Stella and Alan down beautiful coastlines and through fraught family dynamics, Stella can’t help but feel the spark of why she and Alan were once so close. Before long, they find themselves pulled into each other’s orbits, forcing unspoken feelings and long-hidden truths into the light.

About XiXi Tian

XiXi Tian was born in China and immigrated to the United States when she was a year old. She grew up in central Illinois, graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a degree in history, and then attended Harvard Law School. She is a writer, lawyer, avid reader, and lifelong Midwesterner no matter where she lives. Her debut novel, This Place Is Still Beautiful, was an Indies Introduce and Indie Next Pick and received five starred reviews. You can visit her online at xixiwrites.com.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Marieke on July 07, 2025

Oh, Sam. This story is about Stella, but the more I read, the more my heart ached for Sam, her brother, who died nine months before. Stella captures it perfectly in the chapter "The halfway point." She and Sam lived as two different people: in China, like fluttering butterflies, free and light; in the......more

Goodreads review by Sarah on September 18, 2025

After the death of her brother, Stella Chen’s life is turned upside down. Her life feels incomplete, and her family feels like they are breaking at the seams because her brother was the glue that held them together. With him gone, Stella has a lot to live up to. What makes matters worse is that her......more

Goodreads review by Noi (in & out) on November 01, 2025

"I think all of us do that, to some degree. We see ourselves Becoming, in the grander sense, where we go... The truth is, a place does not decide who you are. The people around you do not decide who you are... We should all be loved for ourselves, because that is the only love that really matters... Ea......more

Goodreads review by jo ୨୧ on August 15, 2025

I am writing this review at midnight, because that's when I remembered to write it. so here is my semi brain dead but somehow cognitive review. I don't question how brains work, but im in a low-key melancholy mood, and that's what this book does to a person. it puts you in a mood that can only be de......more

Goodreads review by Stacy40pages on September 29, 2025

All the Way Around the Sun by Xixi Tian. Thanks to @booksforward for the gifted ARC ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Stella feels left behind her senior year of high school after her brother passed away after he left for college. When her parents go back to China, she’s forced on a college tour with an estranged childhood f......more

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