How many times in life can we start over without losing ourselves?

In the summer of 1986, in a small Chinese village, ten-year-old Junie receives a momentous letter from her parents, who had left for America years ago: her father promises to return home and collect her by her twelfth birthday. But Junie’s growing determination to stay put in the idyllic countryside with her beloved grandparents threatens to derail her family’s shared future.

Junie doesn’t know that her parents, Momo and Cassia, are newly estranged from one another in their adopted country, each holding close private tragedies and histories from the tumultuous years of their youth during China’s Cultural Revolution. While Momo grapples anew with his deferred musical ambitions and dreams for Junie’s future in America, Cassia finally begins to wrestle with a shocking act of brutality from years ago. For Momo to fulfill his promise, he must make one last desperate attempt to reunite all three family members before Junie’s birthday—even if it means bringing painful family secrets to light.

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Linda Rui Feng's debut novel, Swimming Back to Trout River, traces the far-flung orbits of a family across two continents, and explores the themes of music and migration in the aftermath of one of China’s most tumultuous eras in the twentieth century. The novel was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and has also been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize.