Weike Wang – författare

Elegant, intimate, nuanced and electric, Iris is alive to the powers of language and literature, probing desire, connection and the self with singular style and flair.When Iris and Bowen meet at an artists’ residency, the connection is immediate. Both are married to other people, but their long, riveting debates and stolen moments make Iris, an author struggling with writer’s block, feel newly alive.After they return to their lives in New York City, their spiky repartee continues with impassioned debates about books, reflections on a shared Chinese-American heritage and confessions of mutual attraction.When the ticking time bomb of a possible affair becomes impossible to ignore, they meet up for an epic, day-long date that will decide their future.

Praised by Ha Jin as "a genuine piece of literature: wise, humorous, and moving," and perfect for readers of Lab Girl and Celeste Ng''s Everything I Never Told You, a luminous coming-of-age novel about a young female scientist who must recalibrate her life when her academic career goes off track. Three years into her graduate studies at a demanding Boston university, the unnamed narrator of this nimbly wry, concise debut finds her one-time love for chemistry is more hypothesis than reality. She''s tormented by her failed research--and reminded of her delays by her peers, her advisor, and most of all by her Chinese parents, who have always expected nothing short of excellence from her throughout her life. But there''s another, nonscientific question looming: the marriage proposal from her devoted boyfriend, a fellow scientist, whose path through academia has been relatively free of obstacles, and with whom she can''t make a life before finding success on her own. Eventually, the pressure mounts so high that she must leave everything she thought she knew about her future, and herself, behind. And for the first time, she''s confronted with a question she won''t find the answer to in a textbook: What do I really want? Over the next two years, this winningly flawed, disarmingly insightful heroine learns the formulas and equations for a different kind of chemistry--one in which the reactions can''t be quantified, measured, and analyzed; one that can be studied only in the mysterious language of the heart. Taking us deep inside her scattered, searching mind, here is a brilliant new literary voice that astutely juxtaposes the elegance of science, the anxieties of finding a place in the world, and the sacrifices made for love and family.From the Hardcover edition.

Keru y Nate se conocieron en la universidad, están casados, tienen una perra y provienen de familias muy diferentes. Los padres de ella son inmigrantes chinos, exigentes, detallistas, obsesivos, personas para las que sufrir "sufrir significa luchar y poner la vara lo suficientemente alta como para que nadie se estanque". La familia de él, conservadores de clase trabajadora, desconfía de las ambiciones intelectuales de su hijo así como de su esposa extranjera. "Supongo que nunca seré abuela. Están empecinados en privarme de esa alegría", le dice la madre a Nate cuando se da cuenta de que no tendrán un hijo en breve.  A través de dos vacaciones familiares en distintos momentos de la vida de la pareja, Wang retrata los esfuerzos por integrar todos los mundos que trae una persona consigo cuando inicia una relación: qué se puede dejar atrás definitivamente, qué reaparece en presencia de la familia de origen y cómo se arma esa trama compleja de dinámicas, resentimientos y afectos. Casa de alquiler, una novela llena de humor y ternura, es un retrato inteligente y crítico de la intimidad en el que sobrevuela la pregunta sobre qué es, en definitiva, una familia.