New Skin - by Sarah Wang (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A scalding, darkly humorous debut following an enmeshed mother-daughter duo, both best friends and enemies, and the plastic surgery addiction that warps their lives into a perilous spiral

At twenty-six, Linli Feng is still trying to escape her mother Fanny's orbit. But after three years of estrangement, just when Linli has been accepted into a prestigious graduate program, she is dragged back by Fanny's latest medical catastrophe and forced to return home.

For decades, Fanny has been addicted to plastic surgery, getting bargain procedures in the basements of LA's bootleg beauty industry. Now Fanny's disfigured face is in dangerous revolt, infected and collapsing yet again from black-market injectables.

But even as Linli wades through the wreck of family finances and juggles her mother's medical care, Fanny has another secret in store. Fanny has won a spot on America's Beauty Extreme, a reality television competition in which botched plastic surgery addicts compete for reconstructive surgery as riveted audiences tune in. When Linli attempts to rescue Fanny from the sinister subculture that has already claimed her mother's face, she must at last confront the corrosive reality of American success that is at the fraught heart of their relationship.

Review Quotes

"New Skin offers a brilliantly dark account of a mother and her daughter locked in a relationship with each other and the wider world that no amount of surgery can cure. Sarah Wang's novel is intense, engaging, original and hilarious."--Colm Tóibín, New York Times bestselling author of Long Island

"A blistering addition to the cannon of mother-daughter fiction. Out of the intimately known landscape of a mother's face and the estrangement of plastic surgery, Sarah Wang maps new territory for where daring, contemporary writing about family might go next. This is a phenomenal first novel not to be missed."--Idra Novey, author of Take What You Need

"Horror, true crime investigation and coming-of-age genres wildly collide in Sarah Wang's inventive and brilliant debut novel New Skin. But her agenda is something more subtle: how do circumstance, culture and character combine to define us? Completely engaging, surprising and beautifully written, I couldn't stop reading."--Chris Kraus, author of The Four Spent the Day Together

"Sarah Wang's New Skin is a marvel. Mirthfully and mercilessly abject, New Skin is a page-turner that feels equal parts cinematic romp and serrated analysis of some of the most important issues of our day: immigration, assimilation, debt, intergenerational suffering, self-immolation, and the possibilities for repair. A truly original debut from a seriously intelligent writer."--Maggie Nelson, author of Like Love and The Argonauts

About the Author

Sarah Wang has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Harper's Bazaar, n+1, and BOMB, among other publications. Wang is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow, a 2023 MacDowell Fellow, a 2020 Center for Fiction Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow, and the winner of a Barbara Deming Award and a Nelson Algren prize for fiction. She teaches writing at Barnard College and lives in New York City.