Grace D Li Books in Order

Grace D. Li grew up in Pearland, Texas, outside Houston, in a family shaped by science, immigration, and high expectations. Her parents came to the United States from small villages in China for graduate school, and later became cancer researchers and professors. That mix of ambition, sacrifice, and questions about what the next generation owes the last sits close to the surface of her fiction.

She was also a serious reader from the start. Li has said she spent so much time with books that her parents once checked with the school librarian to make sure it was all right. It was. Reading gave her a private world, but it also showed her a gap, because few of the stories she found as a kid reflected her own Chinese American life.

Science and storytelling showed up early, and neither one left.

At Duke University, Li studied biology and creative writing. College widened her sense of what fiction could do. She has spoken about discovering books by Asian American writers and realizing, maybe for the first time, that a novel could center people who looked and sounded like the people she knew. She has pointed to Chemistry by Weike Wang as one of the books that helped unlock that idea.

She started writing longer work while studying for the MCAT, partly because she needed something in her life that was not just test prep. Her first full manuscript was a feminist retelling of The Iliad. After Duke, she taught high school biology in New York City before heading to Stanford School of Medicine, and she kept writing in the margins of a very full schedule. During her first year at Stanford, her short story "Time Like Water" placed in the Paul Kalanathi fiction contest.

Her debut novel, Portrait of a Thief, made that balancing act visible to a much bigger audience. The book follows Will Chen and four other Chinese American young people as they attempt to steal back five sculptures looted from Beijing and now held in Western museums. It moves like a heist novel, with planning, break-ins, speed, and risk, but it is just as interested in family pressure, cultural inheritance, and the uneasy feeling of being told you are too American in one place and not American enough in another.

Portrait of a Thief is a thriller on the outside and a book about belonging at its core.

Readers responded to both sides of that equation. The novel became an instant New York Times bestseller, but the reason it stuck with many people was simpler. Li uses a fast plot to hold bigger questions about history, loyalty, and the cost of carrying other people's hopes. The characters are not just trying to pull off a job, they are trying to understand what reclaiming something really means.

That seems to be the lane Li keeps returning to. Her work circles diaspora, identity, ambition, and the strange weight that can come with being the child of immigrants who wants to honor the past without being pinned to it. Even her forthcoming novel, Anatomy of a Betrayal, points in that direction, bringing science, suspicion, and questions of national belonging into the frame.

Li graduated from Stanford School of Medicine and is now an emergency medicine resident physician at Harvard. She has described medicine and fiction as two ways of making sense of the world, and that pairing feels central to her writing life. Her books ask hard questions, but they do it through smart, worried, funny people in motion, people trying to figure out what they owe their families, their history, and themselves.

She still writes like someone who knows real life rarely fits into one neat story.