Meng Jin Books in Order

Meng Jin was born in Shanghai, then lived in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Her fiction often moves across borders, through families, and into the uneasy space between what people remember and what they choose not to say.

She studied at Harvard College and later earned an MFA in fiction from Hunter College. Jin has said she did not come from a literary background and was still learning the basics of short fiction when she began seriously writing. That willingness to learn shows up in the patience of her work, which gives characters room to contradict themselves.

Before her first book, her short fiction appeared in literary magazines and was later included in both The Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She has also received support through fellowships and grants, including the Kundiman, David T. K. Wong, and Steinbeck fellowships.

Then came a first novel that took years of drafting.

Published in 2020, Little Gods follows Liya, a young woman who returns to China with her mother's ashes after growing up in the United States. The book circles Su Lan, Liya's brilliant and guarded physicist mother, while shifting among Shanghai, Beijing, and a mountain village. It ties a private family mystery to migration, class, ambition, and the legacy of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Readers who like layered stories about mothers and daughters, hidden histories, and people trying to understand the past will find plenty to hold onto.

Jin's characters rarely get neat answers.

Her second book, Self-Portrait with Ghost, arrived in 2022. It is a collection of ten linked stories about Chinese women navigating love, friendship, loss, isolation, and the strange ways identity can change under pressure. Some stories stay close to everyday life, while others let ghosts, shifting selves, and other unreal elements enter the frame. The collection was written during the Trump years and the early pandemic, but its real focus is the intimate question of how people keep living with uncertainty.

Across both books, Jin returns to grief, memory, desire, and the gap between one person's version of events and another's. She is interested in relationships that are hard to name, family ties that stretch across countries and years, and people who are trying to make a usable life from incomplete knowledge.

Her work has received nominations for prizes including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Open Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Prize. She is currently working on a fake memoir, a fitting next step for a writer who likes to test the border between fact, story, and the self someone builds out of both.