Central Places

A Novel

By: Delia Cai

Narrated by: Natalie Naudus

A PHENOMENAL BOOK CLUB PICK • “A sensitive, sharp-eyed, slyly funny novel of venturing back into the foreign country that is your past—and discovering that you can never really shake the places and people that shaped you.”—Celeste Ng, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Our Missing Hearts

A young woman’s past and present collide when she brings her white fiancé home to meet her Chinese immigrant parents in this vibrant debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.

A HARPER’S BAZAAR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Audrey Zhou left Hickory Grove, the tiny central Illinois town where she grew up, as soon as high school ended, and she never looked back. She moved to New York City and became the person she always wanted to be, complete with a high-paying, high-pressure job and a seemingly faultless fiancé. But if she and Manhattan-bred Ben are to build a life together, in the dream home his parents will surely pay for, Audrey can no longer hide him, or the person she’s become, from those she left behind.

But returning to Hickory Grove is . . . complicated. Audrey’s relationship with her parents has been soured by years of her mother’s astronomical expectations and slights. The friends she’s shirked for bigger dreams have stayed behind and started families. And then there’s Kyle, the easygoing stoner and her unrequited crush from high school that she finds herself drawn to again. Ben might be a perfect fit for New Audrey, but Kyle was always the only one who truly understood her growing up, and being around him again after all these years has Old Audrey bubbling up to the surface.

Over the course of one disastrous week, Audrey’s proximity to her family and to Kyle forces her to confront the past and reexamine her fraught connection to her roots before she undoes everything she's worked toward and everything she's imagined for herself. But is that life really the one she wants?

©2023 Delia Cai (P)2023 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Delia [Cai] does an incredible job of capturing the complicated feelings that returning home can evoke—especially when an old boyfriend is involved. I love this intergenerational immigrant tale and Delia’s sharp social commentary about identity, and cultural differences. Delia Cai is an exciting new voice in fiction.”—Emily Giffin, The Today Show

“For anyone who spent the holidays listening to Taylor Swift’s “Tis the Damn Season” and brooding in their hometown . . . [Central Places is] a Hallmark movie plot with a literary bend, and Cai’s musings on being a person of color in a small town add a refreshingly nuanced layer to a classic story.”—Buzzfeed

“[A] luminous depiction of the complications of relationships with friends, old and new romantic loves, and immigrant parents.”—Electric Literature

slow

Struggled to finish. A slow story lacking in depth. The ending was weak and needed more substance.

The struggle of the immigrant’s child

I loved this book. I am an immigrant myself and I have a daughter who I’m sure feels like Audrey sometimes. Audrey is not particularly likable but she is very human and real. Her parents’ cruel behaviors (by cultural standards) are described with compassion and the clueless all American boyfriend is given the benefit of the doubt. A great book about the immigrant and assimilation experience

Easy story to follow along

The narrator does well to distinguish between characters. I appreciate that. The story does reference some racism and an intimate scene. overall, it is a good story about growth and reflection on one's life.

Struggled through this one

This book started out okay until all the racial and political rhetoric. The mother was not that bad just being a mother. Audrey thought a lot of herself just because of her heritage. All people are special, not just Asian and immigrants. I got really fed up with the references to white people. I would not recommend this book to anyone, far to racial.

Judgment meets Judgment

While the main character has struggled with being the a victim of discrimination, she is constantly doing to others the very thing she has spent her life fighting. When did equality become putting others down and preemptively making them the lesser person? I could not finish the book.