Two sisters examine what they owe each other and what they are willing to sacrifice to make their family dreams come true.

What would you give up for the person you love most? What would you expect in return?

Mia and Cricket have always been close. The gifted daughters of a young single mother, the “Lowe girls” are well-known in the small Maine town they call home. Each sister has a role to fill: The responsible and academically minded Mia assumes the position of caregiver far too young, while Cricket, a bouncing ball of energy and talent, seems born for soccer stardom. But the cost of achieving athletic greatness comes at a steep price.

As Mia and Cricket grow up, they must grapple with the legacy of their mother’s secret past while navigating their own precarious future. Can Mia allow herself to fall in love at the risk of repeating a terrible history? Will Cricket’s relentless chase of a lifelong goal drive her sister away? When does loyalty become self-sabotage?

A sharply observed and tender portrait of sisters, love, and ambition, Spectacular Things is a sweeping story about the impossible choices we’re forced to make in pursuit of our dreams.

In this dazzling debut, Stegner Fellow Jemimah Wei explores the formation and dissolution of family bonds in a story of ambition and sisterhood in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore.

Before Arin, Genevieve Yang was an only child. Living with her parents and grandmother in a single-room flat in working-class Bedok, Genevieve is saddled with an unexpected sibling when Arin appears, the shameful legacy of a grandfather long believed to be dead. As the two girls grow closer, they must navigate the intensity of life in a place where the urgent insistence on achievement demands constant sacrifice. Knowing that failure is not an option, the sisters learn to depend entirely on one another as they spurn outside friendships, leisure, and any semblance of a social life in pursuit of academic perfection and passage to a better future.

When a stinging betrayal violently estranges Genevieve and Arin, Genevieve must weigh the value of ambition versus familial love, home versus the outside world, and allegiance to herself versus allegiance to the people who made her who she is.

In the story of a family and its contention with the roiling changes of our rapidly modernizing, winner-take-all world, The Original Daughter is a major literary debut, rife with emotional clarity and searing social insight.