Book Launch | All the Way Around the Sun by XiXi Tian

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ABOUT THE BOOK

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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

XiXi Tian was born in China and immigrated to the United States when she was a year old. She grew up in central Illinois. She graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a degree in history and then graduated from Harvard Law School. She is a tech lawyer by day and a writer by night. Her young adult debut, This Place Is Still Beautiful, was an Indies Introduce and Indies Next selection, a winner of the Chinese American Librarians Association for Best Young Adult Fiction, and received five starred reviews. Although she now lives on Long Island with her husband, son, and cat, she is a lifelong Midwesterner at heart.

IN CONVERSATION WITH

E. L. Shen is a writer and editor whose debut middle grade novel, The Comeback received two starred reviews, and was praised for its “fast-paced prose, big emotions, and authentic dialogue” in The New York Times. Her young adult debut, The Queens of New York is a New York Public Library Best Book of the Year, a YALSA Best Book of the Year, a Junior Library Guild Selection, and a Common Sense Media Selection. Her most recent novel, Maybe It’s a Sign, published in January 2024 and is a Bank Street Best Book of the Year. E. L. received her Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College of Columbia University, where she majored in English with a concentration in creative writing. Follow her on Instagram at @elshenwrites or learn more at elshenwrites.com.