How to watch Celeste Ng discuss ‘Our Missing Hearts’ at the L.A. Times Book Club

Author Celeste Ng joined the L.A. Times Book Club on Dec. 8 to discuss her new bestseller, “Our Missing Hearts.”

You can watch Ng’s conversation with Times columnist Patt Morrison on YouTube, Twitter or Facebook.

“Our Missing Hearts” is the story of a 12-year-old boy named Bird growing up in a near future overtaken by great fear and repression.

Bird’s Chinese American mother, a poet and activist, left the family and went into hiding years earlier. But when the boy receives a mysterious letter from his mother, he is drawn into a quest to find her.

Ng’s foray into speculative fiction “sounds really different” from the Midwest suburban settings of her previous novels, she acknowledged in an a Times interview. “And yet, how dystopian is it? And I think that’s what most readers are finding. The common thing that I’ve been hearing, in little bits from Twitter or from reader emails, is that it’s not actually that dystopian. It feels scarily real.”

Ng published her debut novel, “Everything I Never Told You,” in 2014. She followed up in 2017 with “Little Fires Everywhere,” a bestseller that was adapted into a popular Hulu series starring Kerry Washington and Reese Witherspoon.

Reese Witherspoon, left, and Kerry Washington in a scene from “Little Fires Everywhere.”

(Hulu)

“Our Missing Hearts” is the book club’s December selection. In January, we’re reading “Rough Sleepers” by Pulitzer Prize winning author Tracy Kidder. Get tickets.

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