When Celeste Ng watchedBig Little Lieslast spring, she conjured up a fantasy.
she recalls to EW.
It was a pipe dream at the time.
Credit: Kevin Day
But a lot can happen in a year.
Its the culmination of a string of smashing successes Ng, 37, has experienced recently.
Released last September,Little Fireshas spent 25 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.
Penguin (2)
(Everythingspent 46 weeks there in 2014.)
Her work strikes a magical balance between the literary and the book-club-ready.
WithLittle Fires, Ng tested that philosophy on herself.
Reese Witherspoon/Twitter
The novel is set in 90s Shaker Heights, Ohio, the community she grew up in.
Its sheen of progressive idealism shaped Ng into someone who believed in making the world a better place.
But Ng takes solace in her Twitter community and its strange, interactive experience a reclusive novelist shes not.
To speak with Ng is to realize precisely how shes emerged as the novelist of the moment.
The pulse of our collective day-to-day filters into her worldview and her work.
I honestly dont know why [Little Fires] has resonated, she says, humbly.
But for a long time now, theres been an appetite for these kinds of stories.
Surreal is the only word I can come up with, she admits.
Its a dream come true.
