In this "book of living memory," novelist Ng (Bone) examines the cascading effects of U.S. immigration laws on her Chinese family. From Ng's great-grandfather, a miner who was denied citizenship by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, to her father, who eluded exclusion in 1940 by memorizing the photos, maps, and biographical details of a stranger's life and passing them off as his own, Ng's family history is defined by absences and secrets: "Asking was disobedience: children didn't need to know the whole story," she writes. Years after the Exclusion Act was repealed and the Eisenhower-era Confession Program, which lured people into confessing illegal entry, revoked her father's citizenship, rifts within the family remained: the Ng sisters took their father's original name while their brothers kept the one he'd assumed to stay in the U.S.; their parents' marriage soured and the siblings became estranged. Grieving the deaths of her mother, father, and youngest brother, Ng returned home to examine her fragmented memories and scraps of handwritten ephemera for glimpses of what might be known of her whole family history, peeling back the lies her father told to survive so she might better understand her place in the world. The author's straightforward prose and the work's staggering scope bring home the myriad ways misguided policies damaged generations of immigrant families. Readers will be rapt. (May)

Each of Ng's exquisite books, Bone (1993), Steer toward Rock (2008), now this, is worth the 15-year wait in-between. After two novels (although her sister has said about her fiction, "'I know where you got everything'"), Ng presents a luminous memoir, finding transformative, aching authenticity in revealing difficult lives. In 1940, Ng's father was one of the infamous Angel Island's final detainees. To circumvent the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which engendered generations of Chinese American "orphan bachelors," Ng's Big Aunt paid $4,000 (today's equivalent, $82,000) for Ng's father to become the paper son of a U.S. citizen. He lost that paper citizenship in 1966 when he entered the Chinese Confession Program; he was legally naturalized in 2001. Exclusion and confession profoundly defined Ng's and her family's identity. As the firstborn to her sailor father and seamstress mother, Ng bore the brunt of responsibility for three younger siblings. Home life was complicated. Deh left for long stretches, leaving Mah overworked, their relationship acrimonious. Ng escaped San Francisco for New York City, but death (of baby brother, father, mother) eventually called her home. Ng pithily encapsulates the decades: "On Being a Confession Baby, Chinatown Daughter, Baa-Bai Sister, Caretaker of Exotics, Literary Balloon Peddler, and Grand Historian of a Doomed American Family." Her exceptional storytelling elucidates and illuminates.