A Country
of Ghosts
A Country
of Ghosts.
A novel of migration written in the register of a hymn. A Fujianese seamstress arrives in San Francisco with a suitcase of her mother's threads and, over the course of six decades, stitches an America the country did not know it had.
A novel of migration written in the register of a hymn. Chen's Fujianese seamstress arrives in San Francisco with a suitcase of her mother's threads and, over the course of six decades, stitches an America the country did not know it had.
The prose is at once unhurried and unrelenting — Chen writes as though she has been waiting a long time to say precisely this, precisely so — and the novel finds room, in a book that never announces its ambitions, for a chess prodigy who appears for a page and a half and is never mentioned again, for the smell of ginger through the third-floor window of a laundry, for a two-column letter from a sister in Fuzhou that we read in translation on the left and in the sister's untranslated hand on the right. There is a scene, late in Part II, of a woman folding the wedding dress of a bride she has never met — a bride she will never meet — that we will remember as long as we remember any single page of American fiction from this year.
In its second half the book becomes a ghost story of a kind we have not seen in American fiction: not haunted, exactly, but attended— by the dead, by the unmade, by the country the seamstress had kept meaning to become. Chen's ghosts are neither symbols nor visitations. They are what happens when a life ceases to fit inside the one country it has been asked to occupy.
The panel read four hundred and two novels for the 2025 season. We read them, as we were asked, without regard for the publisher on the spine, and we returned again and again, without conferring, to this book. It is Chen's fourth novel, and her first with a small press. It is also — and we say this after some deliberation — the finest thing she has written, and one of the finest novels of the American decade.
The prize is awarded to Mira Chen, for A Country of Ghosts, published by Cormorant Press of New York in April of two thousand twenty-five. A book that will be read for a hundred years.
The 2025 Fiction Jury of the American Book Awards:
A Country of Ghosts
My mother gave me the threads on a Tuesday. She wrapped them, one at a time, in the tissue that had once held her wedding bowl, and she put them in the case that had once held her father's uniform. Red first, then black, then the pale green that had been her sister's, and finally the white, which she left in its skein because she did not trust me to keep it clean until I arrived.
She said, You will not know what to do with these.And I said, No, and she said, Good. That means you will keep them.
The boat took twenty-one days. In the third week I opened the case and looked at the threads. They had not moved. This surprised me, and it took me some time, later, to understand why.
In San Francisco, my aunt met me at the pier. She was smaller than I had remembered, and her hands were pinker at the edges, as though she had been washing something a long time. She said, Do you have the threads,and I said Yes, and she nodded and did not ask to see them.
She took me to Grant Avenue, to the third floor above a laundry that belonged to a man who had known my grandfather. The window of my room faced east. In the morning it smelled of ginger. In the evening it smelled of the alley. For six years I lived in that room without opening the case, and for the six years after that I opened it every day.
I did not sew, in that first year, for anyone but my aunt and myself. I altered a jacket for the man downstairs, and then for his brother; I hemmed a curtain for a schoolteacher who paid me in pears. I did not touch the red thread, because it was my mother's, and I did not touch the green, because it was my aunt's sister's, and I did not touch the white, because I was afraid of it.
I used the black.
Three questions with Mira Chen.
Excerpted from the 2025 Reading Room, Vol. XLV, No. 24. Conducted by Priya Anand at the Cormorant Press offices, Brooklyn, three days after the ceremony.
I don't think I could have said it before I read the citation. That was the strange thing. I had been trying, in interviews, to describe the mother, and the aunt, and the woman who folds the wedding dress in Part II — I had been reaching for a word that was not haunted. Because hauntedhas a direction to it, doesn't it? A ghost haunts a place; a place is haunted bysomething. And what I was after — what I hope the book is after — is a condition of being attendedin every direction at once. By the dead, yes. But also by the living, and by the country you keep not becoming. There is a kind of attention that flows both ways. It is what my mother's threads are, in the book. They are attention.
It was a decision. I had a very good time at FSG with The Third House, and I had no complaint with anyone there, but I had written a book that I did not think was for a house that could put it on nineteen thousand bookshelves in a first printing. I wanted it to sit on a small shelf for a long time. I don't mean that as a mystical claim. I mean that Cormorant would print two thousand copies, and I could stand behind two thousand copies. I could not stand behind nineteen thousand.
Sam Costigan, at Cormorant, read the manuscript in seven days. He did not ask for changes. That was, I think, the first time in my life a publisher had not asked for changes. He said, I will not change a line, and I will not sell more than four thousand copies of this book in the first year, and I will keep it in print until I die. I said yes.
I am reading the panel's other four books, because I feel I owe them the attention. I am reading Wendell Foster's A Grammar of the River, from the nonfiction shortlist, which is a book I have wanted to read since April and refused to let myself read until after the ceremony. I am rereading the Housekeepingpaperback my mother gave me in 1994. And I am reading a manuscript that I think is by a writer twenty-three years younger than me, and I think she is very good, and I am trying to write her back a letter that will not condescend.
"A book that will be
read for a hundred years."
Reception in the American, British, and translated press since publication. Compiled by the foundation for the season archive.
Chen writes with the patience of a woman who has decided she will only be understood eventually.This is the great American novel we did not know 2025 was going to give us.Parul Sehgal— The New Yorker, June 2025
An immigrant novel in the tradition of Cather and Kingston and no one else. There is a scene late in Part II I read three times, and would read again tomorrow.Dwight Garner— The New York Times, May 2025
The most patient American novel I have read in a decade. It is a book about attention, and it demands the kind of reading it is about.James Wood— London Review of Books, September 2025
Chen's Fujianese seamstress is one of those characters — like Bishop's fish, like Baldwin's Rufus — who steps out of the book and stays.Namwali Serpell— Harper's, October 2025