Synopsis
When Linli Feng returns home to LA after three years’ absence she is aghast at what she finds. Her mother, Fanny, is unrecognizable. In her endless quest to achieve the ‘right’ kind of beauty, Fanny has spent the intervening years having bargain procedures in the basements of LA’s bootleg beauty parlours. Now Fanny’s disfigured face is in dangerous revolt, infected and collapsing from black-market injectables.
But even as Linli tries to wean Fanny off her addiction and wades through the wreck of her finances, her mother has another secret in store. She has won a spot on America’s Beauty Extreme, a reality television competition in which botched plastic surgery addicts compete for reconstructive surgery as riveted audiences tune in.
When Linli attempts to rescue her mother from the sinister subculture that has already claimed her mother’s face, she must at last confront the corrosive reality of the American dream that lies at the very heart of their relationship.
Details
11 June 2026
9781035085385Reviews
Sarah Wang’s New Skin is a marvel. Mirthfully and mercilessly abject, New Skin is a page-turner that feels equal parts cinematic romp and serrated analysis of some of the most important issues of our day: immigration, assimilation, debt, intergenerational suffering, self-immolation, and the possibilities for repair. A truly original debut from a seriously intelligent writer
New Skin offers a brilliantly dark account of a mother and her daughter locked in a relationship with each other and the wider world that no amount of surgery can cure. Sarah Wang’s novel is intense, engaging, original and hilarious
Horror, crime, and coming-of-age genres collide wildly in Sarah Wang’s inventive and brilliant debut novel. Completely engaging, surprising and beautifully written
New Skin holds almost all of womanhood: impossible beauty standards, the inverted mother–daughter bond, and an adulthood rooted in the endless negotiation between obligation and shared trauma. This dynamite book is unsparing and darkly funny. It asks why does leaving often mean staying, and why does self-preservation so often become self-destruction?
