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“Sunbirth” by An Yu

In the isolated town of Five Poems Lake, the sun has been slowly disappearing for 12 years, but now a new sliver is missing each day. As the town cools and plunges further into darkness, the people must face their impending deaths until individuals’ heads begin to transform, erupting into balls of light, becoming their own small suns. Uncertain if these ‘Beacons’ will save the town or seal its fate, two sisters must navigate this new reality and the role their father’s mysterious disappearance may have played in it, all those years ago.  

Fans of Haruki Murakami and I Who Have Never Known Men will enjoy An Yu’s surrealist and female perspective. An exploration into grief, survival, and the obligations and complexities of family, An Yu creates a hypnotizing and emotional experience that provides more questions than answers.   

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for an advanced copy of this novel for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

A Writer’s Craft Takeaway

For readers wanting to learn more about writing, An Yu helps the reader accept the impossible through the characters and the mundane aspects of their lives.

The novel begins grounded in the perspective of the narrator as she prepares to open the pharmacy she runs. Ready to go about a normal day in a world where the sun has been disappearing for 12 years. This could feel hard to fathom, impossible to accept, but our narrator is unrattled, more concerned with breakfast and a sore throat than the end of the world, and so we share her concerns.

Then our narrator addresses the strangeness of it. The sun has been disappearing after all, Yu anticipates the readers’ need for some context, some answers to the severity of the problem at hand. We find out that people were concerned at first but, “People had to live, after all, and life was already a large enough mess, even before the sun started to disappear…but as long as the sun continued to rise, we had to live, and to live for most people, was to survive as an individual, not as a species.” And can anything be more commonplace, more relatable than for life to go on, to go to work and cook meals, while natural disasters, wars, and injustices happen all around us?

By staying close to character and sprinkling the speculative among the usual, An Yu creates a world that invites the reader in and makes them feel at home among the impossible.

Jozzie Stuchell Velesig
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Jozzie Stuchell Velesig

Growing up in Appalachia, I was surrounded by natural storytellers. The air around me permeated with their tales while I read every book I could find. Stories became essential to my identity. I was lucky to have parents who encouraged reading. Our home was too rural to use the closest public library, so my mother would take me every year to a charity book sale where you could fill up a Walmart bag for a dollar. We would leave with the bed of her red Silverado loaded down with books. I would then lay them all on the living room floor, showing my dad every book I had picked. Undiagnosed dyslexia left my dad barely able to read into adulthood. He would beam at me and my piles of books, proud to foster a love of story for his daughter. Moments like these formed me.

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