“You have to learn how to listen to yourself again, to be yourself.”Įver since gaining viral fame with a violin performance that captured an online audience of over a hundred million people, and then going on an exhausting concert tour, Anna Sun has found herself stuck in a spiralling loop of ever-increasing distress, anxiety, and fatigue. Every character Helen Hoang writes is vivid and beautiful, but she has truly gone above and beyond with the two leads in this intimately written wonder of a novel. This marvellous, eye-opening, and at times, confronting read explores so poignantly a young woman’s battle to find herself and her own strength within a demanding, traditional Chinese-American family, whilst also learning to embrace the love of a man who accepts her as she is.

There are stories that, quite simply, change the fabric of a genre in my eyes, and Helen Hoang astonishes with the strength of her storytelling and the powerful emotional resonance of her searing new novel.

Anna and Quan have to fight for their chance at love, but to do that, they also have to fight for themselves. However, when tragedy strikes Anna’s family she takes on a role that she is ill-suited for, until the burden of expectations threatens to destroy her. Their first attempt at a one-night stand fails, as does their second, and their third, because being with Quan is more than sex-he accepts Anna on an unconditional level that she herself has just started to understand. That’s where tattooed, motorcycle-riding Quan Diep comes in. The more unacceptable the men, the better. Translation: She’s going to embark on a string of one-night stands. And when her longtime boyfriend announces he wants an open relationship before making a final commitment, a hurt and angry Anna decides that if he wants an open relationship, then she does, too. When violinist Anna Sun accidentally achieves career success with a viral YouTube video, she finds herself incapacitated and burned out from her attempts to replicate that moment.

The love principle helen hoang