“She has nothing tethering her her north star is art.

Then Mia arrives, a peripatetic artist and “free spirit”, who has “deliberately eschewed” all that Elena has sought she doesn’t care about money or own anything that doesn’t fit into her old VW car.

“From the start I had these two families, the Richardsons and Warrens, two poles around which the story was going to rotate.” Elena is set on “doing the right thing” but she is also “all about order and stability and legacy her family has been in Shaker Heights for several generations, and she has the big house and the cars and the husband and the children and steady job”. Ng says her book “resonates with everything happening now … I’m happy that readers are finding it relevant”. The surface may appear smooth but lurking problems (race, class) will eventually rise disruption is required for truths to be revealed. But Ng also asks whether progressives who politely say sympathetic things yet give up nothing that really costs will ever achieve meaningful change. The illusory, facile nature of that idea is exposed in the novel. No one sees race here,” fair-haired Lexie Richardson says in the book, which speaks to the 1990s’ heralding of a “post-racial” era. We often suppress racial and cultural biases in ourselves, Ng has suggested, even when “we can identify them in someone else”. The starting assumption of the novel, which is set in the 1990s, is that the city’s leading families are liberal and well meaning, but they are also blind to their privilege, and are soon forced to confront the limits of their good intentions. Little Fires Everywhere is set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where Ng lived from 1990 until she left for university in 1998 – a prosperous, notably progressive community. When we meet at a stop on her long US promotional tour, Ng (whose Twitter account is talks about how her new book, already highly praised and a bestseller, addresses “race and class and privilege” – though it also continues her fictional investigation into motherhood, the secrets in families and failed attempts to leave one’s past behind. Not an accident.” Another mystery: who did it and why? On the same day, bohemian Mia Warren and her daughter Pearl, who have become closely entangled with the Richardsons, pack up and leave town.

“The firemen said there were little fires everywhere,” one of the children reports: “Multiple points of origin.

It belongs to Elena and Bill Richardson, a picture-perfect married couple with four teenage kids. Ng’s follow-up, Little Fires Everywhere, also begins memorably, with a large, elegant house on an affluent street in flames.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng