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A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK
“Precise, layered and moving, The Original Daughter is a book not to miss.” –NYTBR
In this dazzling debut, Jemimah Wei explores the formation and dissolution of family bonds in a story of ambition and sisterhood in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore.
Before Arin, Genevieve Yang was an only child. Living with her parents and grandmother in a single-room flat inworking-class Singapore, Genevieve is saddled with an unexpected sibling when Arin appears, the shameful legacy of a grandfather long believed to be dead. As the girls grow closer, they must navigate the intensity of life in a brutally competitive place where the insistence on achievement demands constant sacrifice. The sisters become inextricably bound as they spurn outside friendships, leisure, and any semblance of a social life in pursuit of academic perfection and passage to a better future.
When a stinging betrayal violently estranges the sisters, Genevieve must weigh the value of ambition versus familial love, home versus the outside world, and allegiance to herself versus allegiance to the people who made her who she is. In this story of a family and its contention with the roiling changes of our rapidly modernizing, winner-take-all world, The Original Daughter is a major literary debut, imbued with equal parts emotional clarity and searing social insight.
“Precise, layered and moving, The Original Daughter is a book not to miss.” –NYTBR
In this dazzling debut, Jemimah Wei explores the formation and dissolution of family bonds in a story of ambition and sisterhood in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore.
Before Arin, Genevieve Yang was an only child. Living with her parents and grandmother in a single-room flat inworking-class Singapore, Genevieve is saddled with an unexpected sibling when Arin appears, the shameful legacy of a grandfather long believed to be dead. As the girls grow closer, they must navigate the intensity of life in a brutally competitive place where the insistence on achievement demands constant sacrifice. The sisters become inextricably bound as they spurn outside friendships, leisure, and any semblance of a social life in pursuit of academic perfection and passage to a better future.
When a stinging betrayal violently estranges the sisters, Genevieve must weigh the value of ambition versus familial love, home versus the outside world, and allegiance to herself versus allegiance to the people who made her who she is. In this story of a family and its contention with the roiling changes of our rapidly modernizing, winner-take-all world, The Original Daughter is a major literary debut, imbued with equal parts emotional clarity and searing social insight.
Product Details
| Publisher | Doubleday |
| Publish Date | May 06, 2025 |
| Pages | 368 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780385551014 |
| Dimensions | 9.5 X 6.4 X 1.3 inches | 1.4 pounds |
About the Author
JEMIMAH WEI was born and raised in Singapore; she is now based between Singapore and the United States. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University anda Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University, where she earned her MFA. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore’s National Arts Council, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Writers in Paradise, she was named one of Narrative’s “30 Below 30”writers and is a Francine Ringold Award forNew Writers honoree. Her fiction has won the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize and appears in Guernica, Narrative, and Nimrod, among other publications. For close to a decade, Wei was a host for various broadcast and digital channels, and she has written and produced short films and travel guides for Laneige, Airbnb, and Nikon. This is her first novel.
https://jemmawei.com/
https://jemmawei.com/
Reviews
“Glorious. . . Revelatory. . . A tragic, haunting exercise in the limitations of not-quite unconditional love. . . First-time novelist Jemimah Wei poignantly, affectingly observes an extended family that sunders from dysfunction and betrayals in The Original Daughter.”
— Shelf Awareness
“Jemimah Wei’s debut The Original Daughter goes for all the big stuff: ambition, time, family, forgiveness, constructing the self. Thrilling, to find a new author with an appetite for the whole spectrum of living, and the skill to get it down true. A contract of sisterhood is signed, then life, then ambition, then disappointment and heartbreak and and and. Wei’s prose is delicious, propulsively hurdling us through the lives of Gen and Arin, who will live in my marrow forever. The Original Daughter is so much the real deal.”
—Kaveh Akbar, bestselling author of the National Book Award nominee Martyr!
“A beautifully crafted exploration of family, identity, and the complexities of cultural expectations. Wei is a talented, indelible writer with much to offer to a world that is in desperate need of saving.”
—Morgan Talty, national bestselling author of Night of the Living Rez and Fire Exit
“Fiery, funny, and incisive, The Original Daughter is at its core a ghost story. Once, invisibility was the hallmark of the working class, but Jemimah Wei knows in today’s world, where an internet connection allows one to walk through walls, be seen, disappear, and haunt from beyond the analog grave, a soulless transparency is power. A societal privilege ironically afforded to most everyone. This novel adroitly, yet playfully, turns the ways we see cultural appropriation, nepotism, and identity upside down. What a wise and wonderful read.”
—Paul Beatty, author of The Sellout
“Utterly engrossing….elegantly composed…I loved this almost claustrophobic novel about the ways unrealized ambition can turn everything someone holds dear to rot…I cannot put this damn book down.”
—Roxane Gay, author of Hunger
"From the very first page, The Original Daughter consumed me. I soared when Gen's and Arin's dreams came alive; I crashed when heartache wrenched them. With rare wisdom, Jemimah Wei examines the remains of our need to belong and be loved when we chase ambition above all else. Her writing is so incisive and visceral that I did not simply read The Original Daughter; I lived it. This astonishing debut is a tour de force that I'll never forget."
—Qian Julie Wang, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Country
“I laughed, I wept, I called my mom. Instantly and utterly enchanting, reading The Original Daughter felt analogous to being a child again, pushing off real life just so I could stay in the warmth of its pages a second longer. This story of a family and its struggle for freedom, intimacy, and survival asks not just what it means to love, but love well, especially in a world where our relationships can both bond and break us. Jemimah Wei chronicles the eviscerating experience of living under the fracture of modern society with devastating care. Seismic.”
—Jonathan Escoffery, Booker Prize nominee and bestselling author of If I Survive You
— Shelf Awareness
“Jemimah Wei’s debut The Original Daughter goes for all the big stuff: ambition, time, family, forgiveness, constructing the self. Thrilling, to find a new author with an appetite for the whole spectrum of living, and the skill to get it down true. A contract of sisterhood is signed, then life, then ambition, then disappointment and heartbreak and and and. Wei’s prose is delicious, propulsively hurdling us through the lives of Gen and Arin, who will live in my marrow forever. The Original Daughter is so much the real deal.”
—Kaveh Akbar, bestselling author of the National Book Award nominee Martyr!
“A beautifully crafted exploration of family, identity, and the complexities of cultural expectations. Wei is a talented, indelible writer with much to offer to a world that is in desperate need of saving.”
—Morgan Talty, national bestselling author of Night of the Living Rez and Fire Exit
“Fiery, funny, and incisive, The Original Daughter is at its core a ghost story. Once, invisibility was the hallmark of the working class, but Jemimah Wei knows in today’s world, where an internet connection allows one to walk through walls, be seen, disappear, and haunt from beyond the analog grave, a soulless transparency is power. A societal privilege ironically afforded to most everyone. This novel adroitly, yet playfully, turns the ways we see cultural appropriation, nepotism, and identity upside down. What a wise and wonderful read.”
—Paul Beatty, author of The Sellout
“Utterly engrossing….elegantly composed…I loved this almost claustrophobic novel about the ways unrealized ambition can turn everything someone holds dear to rot…I cannot put this damn book down.”
—Roxane Gay, author of Hunger
"From the very first page, The Original Daughter consumed me. I soared when Gen's and Arin's dreams came alive; I crashed when heartache wrenched them. With rare wisdom, Jemimah Wei examines the remains of our need to belong and be loved when we chase ambition above all else. Her writing is so incisive and visceral that I did not simply read The Original Daughter; I lived it. This astonishing debut is a tour de force that I'll never forget."
—Qian Julie Wang, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Country
“I laughed, I wept, I called my mom. Instantly and utterly enchanting, reading The Original Daughter felt analogous to being a child again, pushing off real life just so I could stay in the warmth of its pages a second longer. This story of a family and its struggle for freedom, intimacy, and survival asks not just what it means to love, but love well, especially in a world where our relationships can both bond and break us. Jemimah Wei chronicles the eviscerating experience of living under the fracture of modern society with devastating care. Seismic.”
—Jonathan Escoffery, Booker Prize nominee and bestselling author of If I Survive You
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