Books of Wonder

All the Way Around the Sun

All the Way Around the Sun - Main image
$9.99 $19.99 In stock

Category: Signed Books

*Signed Copies!*

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From the acclaimed author of This Place Is Still Beautiful comes an evocative, achingly romantic road-trip story about grief, diasporic identities, and the deep-buried secrets that haunt us, perfect for fans of Past Lives and The Farewell.

Stella Chen’s life ground to a halt when her brother unexpectedly passed away a year ago. Raised together by their grandmother for years in the Chinese countryside before rejoining their parents in the United States, his absence destroys the connective tissue in her family. With another jarring move her senior year, from rural Illinois to unfamiliar surroundings in San Diego, she is left alone and adrift in her family’s suffocating silence and the void of unanswered questions her brother left behind.

So when Stella’s parents force her to join her estranged childhood friend Alan Zhao for a college tour all over California, Stella dreads it. Alan is a reminder of everything Stella wishes she could be—popular, gregarious, unburdened—and a reminder of how lost she is.

As this road trip takes Stella and Alan down beautiful coastlines and through fraught family dynamics, Stella can’t help but feel the spark of why she and Alan were once so close. Before long, they find themselves pulled into each other’s orbits, forcing unspoken feelings and long-hidden truths into the light.

Customer Reviews (4.0 / 5 · 2 reviews)

Kevin R. ★★★★★

The signed title page is such a nice touch, and the ink is actually from the author's hand, not a printed stamp. I read it in two sittings, crying somewhere around the desert motel chapter. The road-trip grief story hit harder than I expected.

Grace G. ★★★☆☆

The road-trip backdrop and the grief storyline worked well together, and the writing about diaspora identity felt genuine. The signature itself was a bit smudged on my copy though, which was a letdown since that's the whole reason I paid extra.