THREE by Na Zhong (out October 13, 2026)

Three will ship by October 13, 2026.

An expansive yet personal story of a town and a family changed by the breakneck pressures of modernization.

In a small industrial town in China, a family of three—a prideful teacher, her husband, and their quietly rebellious daughter—share a simple life, weathering moves, fights, a layoff, and illnesses. Two decades later, the daughter, now a writer living with her husband in America, reunites with her parents in her hometown after a long separation caused by a global pandemic. The trip is an occasion for her to reflect on her fraught relationship with her mother and the forces that pressurized and combusted their lives: echoes of distant wars and not-too-distant revolutions, tides of breakneck modernization, and the relentless erosion of time.

For fans of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, Three is fable-like and precise, at once a sweeping view of an era and an elegy for a splintered family.

NA ZHONG is a Chinese writer based in New York. Her writings have appeared in The Drift, The Kenyon Review, the Equator, among others. A MacDowell Fellow and Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow, she co-founded Accent Accent and writes a column at China Books Review. Three is her first novella.

Advanced Praise for Three

“Three traces the arc of Chinese modernity with the intimacy and tenderness of a long-forgotten fable. Na Zhong's prose is by turn sumptuous and severe, her characters droll and disarming. A self-contained world thrumming with life comes into crisp view in this compact story, the everyday made exquisite.” —Mike Fu, author of Masquerade

"In quiet, crystalline prose, Three chronicles the story of a family, its members’ individual memories, and their intertwined experiences of love and loss. It explores the idea of home with extraordinary intimacy while sustaining a graceful aesthetic distance. "—Yan Ge, author of Elsewhere

"A story of recent China but also a universal tale of young women's emancipation, Three is a taut and nuanced excavation of maternal love, family bond, and the cost of ambition and change." —Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose

"Think of a collaboration among Stefan Zweig, Natalia Ginzburg, and Jane Austen, and then imagine them in China after Mao and the cultural revolution, at the dawn of the new Chinese capitalism, and the height of the one-child policy. You will not soon forget Na Zhong’s Three, a story of two haunting and haunted parents and their bitingly honest daughter. You will find yourself laughing to keep from crying and stunned at how deeply you come to know this China. Three is a thrilling debut from a writer to watch." —Honor Moore, author of A Termination

"Na Zhong’s debut follows a family of three—mother, father, daughter—in a China that changed faster than its people could. The daughter’s difficult attempt to understand her mother transforms into a reckoning with history as it imprints itself on the smallest details: a school exam, a stolen bicycle, a nutritious soup. Told in sensual prose with sumptuous precision, Three is a novella about belonging to a world that will not hold still." —Yasmin Zaher, author of The Coin