Margaret “returns with a jolt, glances at her watch… I get caught up working, she says, almost embarrassed. In one scene, Noah interrupts his mother working and tells her he’s hungry. What is the true role of the artist in society? Is art personal expression or political commentary? Are artists powerful or powerless? Is creation resistance? Can it make any difference to events? Margaret is at once a fiercely loving mother, an artist completely absorbed in her work and a political activist whose creations inspire the activism of others. Her portrait of Noah’s mother, Margaret Miu, enables her to have some fun with standard arts festival panel questions. Ng effortlessly combines a character-led family story with a detective tale, a tribute to books and storytelling and a confrontation with history. A single lamp minus its shade, naked bulb staring.” Throughout, the writing is quick and poised, even in the descriptions of an ordinary room: “A faded and fraying sofa hunched by the wall, a folded card table covered with tools.

As Noah discovers more about the crisis and the family separations, protests, internments and increasing authoritarianism that followed, he is forced to grow up, find himself as an individual and take a stand as one member of a community. To put it crudely, it does for race what The Handmaid’s Tale did for sex. With this mystery sparked, Our Missing Hearts manages to wrench adventure, heroism and bravery from a painful set-up. To put it crudely, it does for race what The Handmaid’s Tale did for sex What do they mean and what was the real reason for her disappearance? His mother, a famous Chinese-American artist who left him and his father when he was a kid, kickstarts the plot by sending him a letter – already opened and read by the authorities – covered in drawings. Noah Gardner, the young, half-Chinese American hero of the novel, grows up in this dangerous environment, one in which police violence, censorship and discriminatory segregation are the norm. Frighteningly fast, the US develops into a jingoistic, ignorant and violently hostile society governed by racist fear and loathing, in particular of east Asians.

It’s anchored by two fictional conceits: a global “crisis” that tilts the international power balance away from the US and a subsequent piece of US legislation called Pact, the Preserving of American Cultures and Traditions Act.

B estselling American author Celeste Ng’s third novel is a feat of meaty storytelling wrapped around a stark warning about the present day’s racial divisions, political conflicts and inequality.

Our missing hearts book