GINGKO SEASON: A NOVEL (mine)

cover reveal + pre-orders!

Hello everyone! I have exciting news: my debut novel, Gingko Season, is now available for pre-order. The book will be published on May 20th, 2025, but you can buy it RIGHT NOW and get your copy THE EARLIEST MOMENT IT’S POSSIBLE and potentially be ONE OF THE FIRST READERS IN THE WORLD.

Here is the link to pre-order it on Amazon, here is the link for Barnes & Noble, and here is the link for Bookshop.org.

The cover of my book! Please buy it. Pleaseeee

And here is the delightful little teaser that you will find online:

For readers of Elif Batuman and Sally Rooney, a beguiling debut novel about finding oneself after heartbreak.

After suffering her first big heartbreak two years earlier, Penelope Lin has built a quiet life with no romantic entanglements. She spends her days cataloging a museum’s vast collection of Qing Dynasty bound-foot shoes and in the comfortable company of close friends. One day, she happens to meet Hoang, who confesses to releasing mice from the cancer research lab where he works. Hoang’s openness catches Penelope off guard; from then on, she finds her carefully constructed life slowly start to unravel. Told in Penelope’s witty, vulnerable, and thoroughly endearing voice, Gingko Season captures three seasons of reawakening, challenges, and transformation.

This wise and tenderhearted novel explores the nature of our deepest friendships as seriously as it does the dizzying terror and thrill of falling in love, and the complications of trying to live a life that matches your ideals.

I also make some jokes in it that hopefully someone will find funny. And it’s set in the best city in the United States — if you don’t know where that is, you’ll have to buy the book to find out :)

I finished the first draft of Gingko Season in January 2023, and there is at least one little scrap of writing in it that I first jotted down (I say jotted; iPhone notes app duh) in early 2018. I’m very excited to be able to share it with you at long last, next year, on May 20th (520…Chinese Valentine’s Day, no less).

Pre-orders, I am learning, are especially important because they signal how many copies the publisher should print, and they encourage independent bookstores to stock books they may otherwise not know about or want to take a risk on (e.g. a debut novel by a random person they’ve never heard of, i.e. me). So, pre-order! Share with friends, family, enemies, strangers! Tell your favorite bookstore/public library to stock it! Post about it on Instagram and tag me @gingkoseason!

The book costs US$19.99 (or US$18.59 on Bookshop.org for some reason) and it’s a slim and comestible 272 pages — a wonderful present for a friend or a lover, and, if you don’t like reading books, a pretty living room accessory nonetheless. So, once more (sorry! I’m getting used to it too…)—

• Pre-order: Amazon

• Pre-order: Barnes & Noble

• Pre-order: Bookshop.org

Thanks for reading, and I promise the next newsletter will be back to regular programming!