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From the bestselling author of A River of Stars comes a funny, heartfelt novel set in an affluent Bay Area suburb where a Chinese American family moves in and sets off a series of scandals, for fans of Celeste Ng and Emma Straub.
Living in El Nido, a privileged community in the hills east of Berkeley, is supposed to mean you've made it. So when Jin Chang moves there with his wife and daughters after years of scraping by, he hopes it will finally be the end of his bad luck. What his family doesn't know is that he's bending the rules for one final scheme: to make it big in real estate. Next door, Blair Belle prides herself on her progressive politics. After all, she treats their new nanny, Ana Rodriguez, and her daughter like family―even if she doesn't know them all that well. But she can't help but feel skeptical of the new neighbors, especially when she begins to suspect that Jin's plans might interfere with the Belle's own luxury development.
Jin's teenage daughter Jane can tell her dad is keeping a secret, but she's also struggling to navigate El Nido's cliques. Tasha Washington has always felt isolated, too, as one of the only Black girls at the school. In the wake of a coyote attack, Jane and Tasha bond. Together, they hatch a plot to expose the town's hypocrisies. The shockwaves will rock their own families. As fire season escalates, and the roaming coyote continues to unleash chaos, the characters become embroiled in a series of scandals that will change El Nido―and their own fates―forever.
Urgent, riveting, and deeply heartfelt, full of sharp wit and keen empathy, Coyoteland is at once a delicious suburban drama and an unflinching exploration of our current moment.
"Hua's latest novel explores community, resilience, and the power of the natural world...In Coyoteland, Hua deftly explores questions of race and class." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A standout in the wave of 'dark suburbia' novels coming out of the dystopian realities of the embattled West Coast." —Kirkus Reviews
"Appealing to readers of all ages, Hua's novel winds suspensefully from suburban complacency to its fiery consummation." —Library Journal
"Hua nimbly scrutinizes a community in conflict, deftly exposing performative hypocrisies...Hua writes with scathing clarity about half-truths and corrosive lies, exacerbated by post-pandemic amnesia eliding civility and kindness that inevitably leads to conflagratory altercations." —Booklist
"Swift, surprising, and wholly captivating, Coyoteland asks vital questions about race, class, and what it takes to truly belong. In training a discerning eye on one small, close-knit community, Vanessa Hua opens up an entire world. A tour de force from one of my all-time favorite writers, working at the very peak of her talents." ―Kirstin Chen, New York Times bestselling author of Counterfeit
"No one writes like Vanessa Hua. With power, grace, and profound insight, Hua brings to life a community that―like the rest of today's fraught world, and whether all of its inhabitants acknowledge it or not―is in a state of ongoing crisis. A tremendous, mesmerizing gift from this one-of-a-kind storyteller." ―R. O. Kwon, nationally bestselling author of Exhibit
This information about Coyoteland was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Vanessa Hua is the author of the national bestsellers A River of Stars and Forbidden City, as well as Deceit and Other Possibilities, a New York Times Editors' Choice. A National Endowment for the Arts LiteratureFellow, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, theAsian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a California Arts Council Fellowship, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, as well as honors from the de Groot Foundation, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Asian American Journalists Association, among others. She was a finalist for the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and the New American Voices Award. Previously, she was an award-winning columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. She has filed stories from China, Burma, South Korea, Ecuador, and Panama, and her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program and elsewhere. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.
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