CENTRAL PLACES

A young woman's rootless past and uncertain future collide when she brings her white fiancé home to meet her Chinese immigrant parents, toppling her carefully constructed life in this vibrant, insightful debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.

Audrey Zhou left Hickory Grove, the tiny town in central Illinois where she grew up, as soon as high school ended, and she never looked back. She moved to New York City and became the person she always wanted to be, complete with a high-paying, high-pressure job and a seemingly faultless fiancé, Ben. But if she and Manhattan-bred Ben are to build a life together, in the dream home his parents will surely pay for, Audrey can no longer hide him, or the person she's become, from those she left behind.

But returning to Hickory Grove is . . . complicated. Audrey's relationship with her parents has been soured by years of her mother's astronomical expectations and slights. The friends she's shirked for bigger dreams have stayed behind and started families. And then there's Kyle, the easygoing stoner and her unrequited crush from high school that she finds herself drawn to again. Ben might be a perfect fit for New Audrey, but Kyle was always the only one who truly understood her growing up, and being around him again after all these years has Old Audrey bubbling up to the surface.

Over the course of one disastrous week, Audrey's proximity to her family and to Kyle forces her to confront the past and reexamine her fraught connection to her roots before she undoes everything she's worked toward and everything she's imagined for herself. But is that life really the one she wants?

A send-up of the age-old country mouse, city mouse fable as told through the lens of an intergenerational immigrant tale, CENTRAL PLACES combines a wicked sense of humor and propulsive plot with sharp social commentary about identity, family and belonging. A darkly funny and intimate story – in the vein of Jenny Zhang, if she were to write a Hallmark movie – the novel will appeal to readers of QUEENIE, SUCH A FUN AGE, and WRITERS AND LOVERS.

The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Delia Cai grew up in the Midwest and graduated from the University of Missouri journalism school. She is a Vanity Fair staff writer, covering celebrity, style, and culture for the Vanities section. Previously, she was the trends lead at BuzzFeed, and is also the creator of the weekly media newsletter Deez Links (11K subscribers), which has been highlighted in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and the Columbia Journalism Review. Her essays and reporting have appeared in GQ and The Cut. She lives in Brooklyn.