Little Fires Everywhere

Much like her debut novel Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng opens her latest with the end. We see the Richardson's six bedroom house ablaze, Mrs Richardson standing on the tree lawn with her hands clutching the neck of her blue robe, her kids Moody, Trip and Lexie watching from the hood of Trip's Jeep. All of this in the bucolic planned community of Shaker Heights.

The counterpoint to their white, affluent ideal of the American family arrives in town in the guise of bohemian artist Mia Warren and her daughter Pearl. Mia rents out the Richardson's duplex and takes Mrs. Richardson's offer to help cook and clean part time at the house. Sparks are inevitable.

But this is more than a book on class. It explores motherhood in its many guises and the relationship between mothers and daughters. Sometimes the mother you're born to isn't the one you choose to help you fully develop into an independent person. And tying that all together is young Mirabelle McCullough or May Ling Chow. She's a Asian child caught in the middle of a custody battle between the doting adoptive parents - affluent and white, and her mother - on her own and struggling.

Ng explores the ideas of cultural differences and well intentioned gestures that come from a place of privilege and entrenched assumptions. By extension she prods the lie of the post-racial society and those people that simply do not see race - and what that can often really mean.

A confident sophomore novel, thoughtfully written and beautifully done.