The Leavers, Lisa Ko
The Leavers, Lisa Ko
4 Rating(s)
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

The Leavers
A Novel

Author: Lisa Ko

Narrator: Emily Woo Zeller

Unabridged: 14 hr 53 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/02/2017

Categories: Fiction, Coming Of Age


Synopsis

One morning, Deming Guo's mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. They rename him Daniel Wilkinson in their efforts to make him over into their version of an "all-American boy." But far away from all he’s ever known, Daniel struggles to reconcile his new life with his mother’s disappearance and the memories of the family and community he left behind.

Set in New York and China, The Leavers is a vivid and moving examination of borders and belonging. It's the story of how one boy comes into his own when everything he's loved has been taken away—and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of her past.

About Lisa Ko

Lisa Ko's fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, Narrative, Copper Nickel, and the Asian Pacific American Journal. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Writers OMI at Ledig House, the Jerome Foundation, and Blue Mountain Center, among others. A founding coeditor of Hyphen and a fiction editor at Drunken Boat, Lisa was born in Queens and lives in Brooklyn.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Emily May on November 08, 2017

Junior year of high school, he had seen a Chinese woman in the Littletown Mall. Thin, with permed hair, gripping plastic bags with the handles twisted around each other. She'd honed in; there was no hiding his face, and when she spoke he understood her Mandarin. She was lost. Could he help? She n......more

Goodreads review by Rachel on June 25, 2017

I'm having a hard time getting my thoughts together on The Leavers. You know those books that technically do everything right, but you still don't love them for some reason? 3 stars feels unfair to the author, who's created a beautiful story that sweeps across multiple generations and locations, but......more

Goodreads review by Angela M on July 30, 2017

Imagine you're a 17 year old girl named Peilan who becomes Polly, and you've come come to the US from China seeking a better life . And oh by the way you're pregnant and here illegally, owing a loan shark $50,000. You have to work long hours in awful working conditions to scrape enough for the payme......more

Goodreads review by jessica on May 22, 2021

i thought the heart of this story was a really interesting mystery for so much of this book, but then it turned out to be a much more serious commentary on social injustices and my reading experience went from intrigued with a disappearance to so disheartened with how the US handles immigration. i r......more

Goodreads review by Susanne on June 07, 2017

5 Stars. Deming Guo was a young boy when one day, his mother disappeared. That morning, he went to school and she went to work. The difference? He came home. "The Leavers" is a coming of age story about a Chinese American boy named Deming Guo (n/k/a Daniel Wilkinson). Deming had to grow up faster, an......more