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.