Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Unpassing: A Novel
    The Unpassing: A Novel
    The Unpassing: A Novel
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Unpassing: A Novel

    Written by Chia-Chia Lin

    Narrated by Feodor Chin

    4.5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    **A Washington Post best audiobook of 2019**

    "Told in the first person, the story is narrated by Feodor Chin, whose smooth, matter-of-fact voice perfectly suits Gavin’s descriptions of the family’s junky house; his ineffectual, mistake-prone father; his seething mother; and a persistent sense of not belonging." – Star Tribune

    One of Esquire, The Rumpus, The Millions, Literary Hub and Electric Literature's Most Anticipated Books of 2019!

    A searing debut that explores community, identity, and the myth of the American dream through an immigrant family in Alaska.

    In Chia-Chia Lin’s debut, The Unpassing, we meet a Taiwanese immigrant family of six struggling to make ends meet on the outskirts of Anchorage, Alaska. The father, hardworking but beaten down, is employed as a plumber and repairman, while the mother, a loving, strong-willed, and unpredictably emotional matriarch, holds the house together. When ten-year-old Gavin contracts meningitis at school, he falls into a deep, nearly fatal coma. He wakes up a week later to learn that his little sister Ruby was infected, too. She did not survive.

    Routine takes over for the grieving family: the siblings care for each other as they befriend a neighboring family and explore the woods; distance grows between the parents as they deal with their loss separately. But things spiral when the father, increasingly guilt ridden after Ruby’s death, is sued for not properly installing a septic tank, which results in grave harm to a little boy. In the ensuing chaos, what really happened to Ruby finally emerges.

    With flowing prose that evokes the terrifying beauty of the Alaskan wilderness, Lin explores the fallout after the loss of a child and the way in which a family is forced to grieve in a place that doesn’t yet feel like home. Emotionally raw and subtly suspenseful, The Unpassing is a deeply felt family saga that dismisses the American dream for a harsher, but ultimately more profound, reality.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateMay 7, 2019
    ISBN9781250253361
    Author

    Chia-Chia Lin

    Chia-Chia Lin is a graduate of Harvard College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review and other journals. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Unpassing is her first novel.

    Related to The Unpassing

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Elaine Castillo

      Dec 1, 2020

      The writing in it is overall sort of bad, and somehow that’s been a balm, too: somehow I’m finding that I can’t bear a certain kind of good writing; it fits like an expensive coat whose style is all wrong for my body, for the climate, for the era. Th

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Humanity of Being Freakish: The Millions Interviews Kevin Wilson

      Nov 15, 2019

      The goal is that my sons, Griff and Patch, eventually don’t need me anymore. But I can’t reconcile that yet. So, again, I write about that anxiety. The post The Humanity of Being Freakish: The Millions Interviews Kevin Wilson appeared first on The Mi

      7 min read

    • Article

      Ask A Literary Consultant

      Sep 3, 2020

      Ask A Literary Consultant
      2 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Nadia Owusu

      Dec 15, 2020

      If anyone were to ask me for recommendations of books for America’s new leaders to read before they are sworn in, this collection would be on my list. The post A Year in Reading: Nadia Owusu appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Little House

      Jun 5, 2023

      On Monday nights our mother made popcorn and served it to us in mugs with milk poured over. My younger sister and I carried our mugs into the family room and ate the popcorn with spoons, like cereal. We were five and seven. Until we were allowed to s

      21 min read

    • Article

      Free To A Good Home

      Aug 5, 2019

      Mine was a normal enough childhood, as far as we were concerned—“we” being me, my younger, then-bratty sister, Kiley (spelling unofficially changed to Kylie during the Kylie Minogue “Locomotion” years), and my even younger tagalong brother, Dax. I’ve

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Garden In The Desert

      Sep 20, 2021

      A Garden In The Desert
      10 min read

    • Article

      As the World Collapses

      Jul 27, 2017

      As the World Collapses
      7 min read

    • Article

      Challenger

      Dec 1, 2019

      BEFORE DEGREE or meter or mile, my first unit of measurement was the cord: a portion of wood cut for fuel, four by four by eight, or one hundred and twenty-eight cubic feet. Eight cords equaled twenty stacks, six months, the winter buried within the

      17 min read

    • Article

      Penny From Heaven

      Feb 27, 2020

      Penny From Heaven
      5 min read

    • Article

      There’s No Place Like Home: An Artist Reconnects to the Whispers of Her Past

      Apr 7, 2023

      Estimated reading time: 13 minutes — I would be remiss in telling you how two suburbanites found home at our farm, ‘Oakhaven’, without first sharing our motives. There were a few. We had been watching the steady decline of the small towns we love fo

      8 min read

    • Article

      My Country Childhood

      Sep 4, 2019

      AUTHOR AND FORMER executive director of the Australian Writers Guild, Angela Wales, 71, moved from Bondi in Sydney to Walcha in the Northern Tablelands of NSW when she was five years old. Angela’s father, Bob, was to take over a struggling sheep prop

      7 min read

    • Article

      My Family, My Science: One girl’s scientific coming of age.

      Mar 3, 2016

      There is nothing in the world more perfect than a slide rule. Its burnished aluminum feels cool against your lips, and if you hold it level to the light you can see God’s most perfect right angle in each of its corners. When you tip it sideways, it g

      20 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Unpassing

    4.5/5

    5 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words