Everything I Never Told You

Written By Linda Malek
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Everything I Never Told You by @pronounced_ing
Guest review from @niharikawahi✨
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May 3, 1977. Lydia Lee is discovered missing from home. The middle daughter of Marilyn and James Lee, a Chinese-American couple living in small-town Ohio, she's found dead in the town lake, 24 hours later. Thus begins Celeste Ng's "Everything I Never Told You". ⁣
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Lydia is the centre of Marilyn and James's universe, a means of living vicariously the life they never managed to live themselves. A repository of their hopes and dreams, Lydia chafes and unravels under the burden of their expectations. Her sudden and untimely death leads to the unravelling of the carefully constructed facade of the Lees' life, an unspooling of the narrative. The Lees - James, Marilyn, their eldest Nathan, and their youngest Hannah - are forced to take stock and realise that life will never be the same again.⁣
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Poignantly and poetically written, "Everything I Never Told You", will hold you in its grip till you have turned the last page. And, long after.⁣

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

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