Leave Society

de Tao Lin

"A bold portrait of a writer working to balance all his lives-as an artist, a son, and a perpetual tourist-and transform his personal chaos into a triumphant new novel In 2014, a novelist named Li leaves Manhattan to visit his parents in Taipei for ten weeks. He doesn't know it yet, but he will put his life on hold-year after year-to make this trip, chronicling everything that transpires before him. Just as he flits in and out of sobriety, relationships, and drafts of a new book, he will fly between these worlds in hopes of keeping his family together. He will temper arguments, console his parents, and try to understand what it means to find success both as an artist and a son. But how to fit these pieces of his life together? Where to begin? In Leave Society, Tao Lin delivers an engrossing novel about the life, fiction, and where the two blur together. Exploring everyday events and scenes-waiting rooms, dog walks, family meals-Lin spins the ordinary into something monumental, and shows what it is to write a novel in real time. Illuminating and deeply felt, Leave Society is a masterly novel about family and the self"--