Silver Repetition

A Novel

A debut coming-of-age novel that delicately illuminates the fullness of identity despite fractures in language, culture, and relationships

“This is a book of tenderness—compassionate, sore, seeking. All is displacement and the complicated longing it ignites.” —Anne Michaels, author of Fugitive Pieces

A Ms. Magazine Most Anticipated Book

In Silver Repetition, Lily Wang’s endless, perfect loops of memory and dream, loss and return, combine to create a formally inventive coming-of-age novel. Told from the perspective of a young Asian immigrant thoughtfully navigating dual identities, grief, family, migration, and modern relationships, this is a novel infused with the rich language of a poet.

Having left China for Canada with her parents as a child, Yuè Yuè yearns to discover who she is as she nears the end of her undergraduate degree and starts a new relationship. In urgent poetic fragments, she seeks common ground with her Canadian-born younger sister and grieves the beloved cousin she lost touch with back home. After Yuè Yuè receives a call from a girl making accusations, her date ghosts her. Meanwhile, her mother’s illness advances like snow. On a walk in the woods, Yuè Yuè sees a little girl digging in the mud, but when she peeks behind the curtain of black hair, her own face haunts her.

In a moving reunion, Yuè Yuè’s cousin comes to visit and everyone is caught, laughing, in the rain. The novel shows how, despite the weight of grief, isolation, and difference, even the most delicate family bonds can knit together tightly enough for the future to overcome the past.

Praise

“Like hyacinth bulbs, Lily Wang’s Silver Repetition is iridescently and culturally fierce. Acheful with familial bonds, Wang’s narration is hypnotic and rich and intimate and wild, with sharp, overgrown private silvery remembrance that shatters the elevated symbiosis between memoir and memory, mourning and materiality, ancestry and delivery. Highly attentive to details and inoculated with intermittent poetic splendors, it is a diurnal, highly imaginative work that sharpens all our senses and makes us appreciate each second of our lives beyond and within the diaspora.”
—Vi Khi Nao, author of Swimming with Dead Stars
“Lily Wang’s Silver Repetition illumines the forbidden shadows of memory and loss. Wang interrogates the many selves and the words which confront us: bú shì wŏ. Their language burns down a wick as it exposes how we become what we refuse to let go.”
—E.J. Koh, author of The Magical Language of Others
“[Silver Repetition] brims with delicate imagery and flights of imagination. . . . Wang convincingly portrays the bifurcation and complexity of their protagonist’s mind.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Ghostly, fishy, and deeply moving. With sensitivity and grace, Lily Wang captures all the fleeting and contradictory feelings that come from leaving one world behind and entering another. Family members are echo chambers, not empty but rather overflowing with the sounds and sensations of other moments, some mere seconds past, others distant and impossible.”
—Larissa Lai, author of The Lost Century
“When the metaphorical language lands successfully it is a triumph: satisfying sentences filled with keen imagery.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Fiercely poetic and luminous with surrealist imagery, Silver Repetition is a deeply moving and humane exploration of fractured self, deep longing, lost memory, diaspora, and aching family ties. Here is a gorgeous book that reads like a luxurious dreamscape from beginning to end. Wang is a thrilling and captivating new voice in contemporary fiction.”
—Lindsay Wong, author of The Woo-Woo and Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality

Goodreads Reviews