A Quitter's Paradise

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Parker and Zando publisher Stern connected at a lunch hosted by Joanna Coles; Stern had seen Parker photographed with a copy of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl , which Stern had published. This debut novel examines the grief of a young woman desperate to detach from the reality of her mother’s death and estrangement of her family.

Review | NetGalley

Hopefully, the Liu family will appear in future stories or maybe even they will get spinoff stories of their own. To echo what others have said, A Quitter’s Paradise is a stunning debut novel by Elysha Chang, introducing the world to Eleanor Liu and her family. We focused on the lost marmoset as a leading theme from the story, accentuating the strangeness and untethered feeling of being alone in the city.You’re on movie and television sets, and on theater stages—does that preparation and anxiety translate at all to the preparation and anxiety leading up to having a conversation with an author whose book you want to acquire, or to publication day? A Quitter’s Paradise features two major storylines - one in the present where Eleanor is seems to be making increasingly poor decisions after quitting her PhD program and another focused on her parent’s and childhood.

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Punctuating Eleanor’s sections are dips into her family members’ lives, from both earlier years and long before she was born.And at a certain point in all of our lives—I’m one of eight—it just became our own choice and our own habit to always leave the house with something to read.

elysha chang

The book has a dual timeline POV and I think both worked well, though I was most compelled by the present storyline. She still smarts at having lost out on Tommy Orange’s There There to Knopf, “but what was beautiful about that loss,” she says, “was that both Tommy and Fatima debuted on the New York Times bestseller list and shared the spot.

And at some point I understood, I’m not getting more information out of her—that’s part of her charm, right? The surprise plot point at about 50% had me totally mindblown and was super well done (I won't spoil it for everyone else, but lol). This book is still in a different vein, though, as it is primarily about grief and trying to overcome the obstacles of immigration and attempting to find the American Dream for one Taiwanese family. And then you develop a taste for music and a taste for art, and you’re kind of getting a big, full, rich world.

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Dror Cohen has so cleverly captured the irony of Eleanor’s preoccupation with seeing and thinking ‘clearly. In Eleanor Lin and her family, Elysha Chang has created captivating characters, who continuously surprised, delighted, and intrigued me—so much so that I didn’t want to leave them. I would recommend checking it out at least once if you’re interested in any of the themes I’ve mentioned during this review, or if the synopsis ends up vibing with you in a way that resonates. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. She ends up pregnant after quitting the program, but their marriage seems to be rocky from the fact he simply gets everything and she struggles.

The life after that is a conversation I would be, of course, thrilled to have, but it’s not what’s paramount right now. I read on the subway’ I read waiting for meetings; I read while I’m waiting for someone to log on to a Zoom. There’s a lot of imagery and symbolism packed into the story itself—look closely at the cover—and how family dynamics can dictate one person’s life even after the people who’ve caused the most damage and steering are gone. She is seeing another PhD candidate in the program on and off, Samir, despite being married to her husband. As A Quitter’s Paradise follows Eleanor’s winding journey to make sense of herself and her grief, her story is interwoven with those of her family members—from her parents’ lives in the military villages of Taipei, to their early days as immigrants in New York City, to Eleanor and her sister’s childhoods.