This month, we’re reading two novels by Asian American authors that interrogate the promise and perils of starting over in the United States.

Sarah Wang (Little, Brown and Company, 320 pp., $29, May 2026) 

This month, we’re reading two novels by Asian American authors that interrogate the promise and perils of starting over in the United States.

Sarah Wang (Little, Brown and Company, 320 pp., $29, May 2026) 

Botox injections are becoming common among American women. If anything can stymie this trend, it might be Sarah Wang’s debut novel, New Skin. The book paints such a cleverly grotesque picture of the U.S. plastic surgery scene that it could serve as a disincentive to anyone considering such procedures.

New Skin begins when 26-year-old Linli Feng returns to her hometown of Los Angeles to care for her mother, Fan-Ju, or Fanny. Fanny, an immigrant from Taiwan, is broke and addicted to plastic surgery. “My mother was equal parts artificial and human,” Linli says. “The differing aesthetic goals of myriad doctors had made her face a battleground of warring ideals.” Fanny’s obsession with fillers and skin bleaching causes her a range of health issues, and Linli must sacrifice her professional ambitions to deal with them.

Things get even worse when FBI agents show up at the Fengs’ door with news: Fanny has been indicted. The U.S. government claims that Fanny is part of an investigation into a sprawling network of “illegal cosmetic injections” involving Asian women in Los Angeles. Fanny was likely injected with “something like construction-grade polymer,” among other substances. Around the same time, Fanny secretly applies—and is accepted—to appear as a contestant on America’s Beauty Extreme, a reality TV show where contestants with botched plastic surgery compete to win a reconstructive procedure.

Fanny’s ordeal is so absurd that New Face necessarily takes on a caustic and humorous tone. A novel that would otherwise be a heart-wrenching mother-daughter saga about the Asian American immigrant........

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