NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • Three generations of Taiwanese American women are
haunted by the myths of their homeland in this spellbinding visceral debut about one family’s
queer desires violent impulses and buried secrets.Gorgeous and gorgeously grotesque . . .
Every line of this sensuous magical-realist marvel is utterly alive.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD •
LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE
YEAR BY O: The Oprah Magazine • NPR • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews One evening
Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman’s body. She was called
Hu Gu Po and she hungered to eat children especially their toes. Soon afterward Daughter
awakes with a tiger tail. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up
letters penned by her grandmother a visiting aunt arrives with snakes in her belly a brother
tests the possibility of flight. All the while Daughter is falling for Ben a neighborhood
girl with strange powers of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother’s
letters Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies a myth—and that
she will have to bring her family’s secrets to light in order to change their destiny. With a
poetic voice of crackling electricity K-Ming Chang is an explosive young writer who combines
the wit and fabulism of Helen Oyeyemi with the subversive storytelling of Maxine Hong Kingston.
Tracing one family’s history from Taiwan to America from Arkansas to California Bestiary is a
novel of migration queer lineages and girlhood. Praise for Bestiary [A] vivid fabulist debut
. . . the prose is full of imagery. Chang’s wild story of a family’s tenuous grasp on belonging
in the U.S. stands out with a deep commitment to exploring discomfort with the body and its
transformations.”—Publishers Weekly
