New Skin

“This page-turner features gritty and intelligent analyses of immigration, Americanism, and deadly beauty standards.”

"In her debut novel New Skin, Sarah Wang renders a mother-daughter relationship with startling intensity and dark wit...Reflecting on the body as a site of history and expression, the performance of vulnerability, and the layered histories embedded in Los Angeles, Wang’s New Skin introduces a sharp, and often humorous, voice attuned to contradiction, where intimacy is as perilous as it is sustaining."

"Despite the frequent cosmetic appointments and name-dropping of beauty jargon, New Skin is not your average wellness critique novel, or even really one at all. Throughout the book, Wang’s preoccupation is not with mocking the beauty industry or even vanity itself, but with using beauty as a vehicle for understanding agency, identity and the realities of the American Dream."

“Wang debuts with the spectacular and wrenching story of a woman contending with her mother’s plastic surgery addiction…This bracing tale goes much more than skin deep.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“If this terrifying era is going to produce a new canon of American immigration novels—and it should!—Sarah Wang’s New Skin will be one of its indisputable masterpieces, a novel of unique brilliance, so beautiful, hilarious, heartbreaking, teeming with a gloriously searing rage but also tenderness.”—Francisco Goldman, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Monkey Boy

“Sarah Wang’s New Skin is a marvel. Mirthfully and mercilessly abject, New Skin is a page-turner that feels equal parts cinematic romp and serrated analysis of some of the most important issues of our day: immigration, assimilation, debt, intergenerational suffering, self-immolation, and the possibilities for repair. A truly original debut from a seriously intelligent writer.”—Maggie Nelson, author of Like Love and The Argonauts

"New Skin offers a brilliantly dark account of a mother and her daughter locked in a relationship with each other and the wider world that no amount of surgery can cure. Sarah Wang’s novel is intense, engaging, original and hilarious."—Colm Tóibín, New York Times bestselling author of Long Island

“New Skin holds almost all of womanhood: impossible beauty standards, the inverted mother–daughter bond, and an adulthood rooted in the endless negotiation between obligation and shared trauma. This dynamite book is unsparing and darkly funny.  It asks why does leaving often mean staying, and why does self-preservation so often become self-destruction?”—Weike Wang, author of Rental House

"Horror and coming-of-age genres wildly collide in Sarah Wang’s inventive and brilliant debut novel New Skin.  But her agenda is something more subtle: how do circumstance, culture and character combine to define us? Completely engaging, surprising and beautifully written, I couldn’t stop reading."—Chris Kraus, author of The Four Spent the Day Together

"A blistering addition to the cannon of mother-daughter fiction. Out of the intimately known landscape of a mother's face and the estrangement of plastic surgery, Sarah Wang maps new territory for where daring, contemporary writing about family might go next. This is a phenomenal first novel not to be missed."—Idra Novey, author of Take What You Need