Little Fires Everywhere

Little Fires Everywhere is the second novel by the American writer Celeste Ng, published in 2017 by Penguin Press. It is set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where the author grew up.

The suburb in the book is an experiment in good intentions: the roads curve where the planners wanted them to curve, the houses are painted from a palette, and the residents, including Elena Richardson, believe in the rules that keep it orderly. Elena rents the family's Winslow Road apartment to Mia Warren, an artist with a habit of leaving towns before she has to explain herself, and to her daughter Pearl, who is the same age as Elena's younger son. The two households become entangled through their children, and the difference between a family that has chosen its life deliberately and one that has invented it from scratch is the subject the novel works through. When a custody dispute involving another family in the neighbourhood goes public, the town's assumptions about who makes a good mother are examined in a way most of the residents were not prepared for.

Ng writes in the third person and moves between a large cast, and the novel opens with the Richardsons' house on fire in 1998 and works back to show how it came about.