The award-winning author of The Leavers offers a visionary novel of friendship, art, and ambition that asks: What is the value of a meaningful life?

In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. “Allied in the weirdest parts of themselves,” they envision each other as artistic collaborators and embark on a future defined by freedom and creativity.

By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier. As a performance artist, Giselle must navigate an elite social world she never conceived of. As a coder thrilled by the internet’s early egalitarian promise, Jackie must contend with its more sinister shift toward monetization and surveillance. And as a community activist, Ellen confronts the increasing gentrification and policing overwhelming her New York City neighborhood. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves.

Moving from the predigital 1980s to the art and tech subcultures of the 1990s to a strikingly imagined portrait of the 2040s, Memory Piece is an innovative and audacious story of three lifelong friends as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.

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Lisa Ko is the author of The Leavers, which was a 2017 National Book Award for Fiction finalist, won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award. The Leavers was a national bestseller and was named a best book of the year by NPR, Entertainment Weekly, BuzzFeed, the Los Angeles Times, and others. Ko’s short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories and her essays and nonfiction have been published in The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere.

Ava Chin is the author of Mott Street, a Best Book of 2023 by TIME, the San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus, and Elle, and the award-winning Eating Wildly. A recipient of awards from the NY Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Fulbright Program, NYFA, NY Institute for the Humanities, and the AAWW, her writing has appeared in The New York Times (“Urban Forager”), the Washington Post, SPIN and VIBE, among others. She is a professor of creative nonfiction at the City University of New York.

Co-sponsored by Yu & Me Books and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop