''The Original Daughter,'' the debut novel by Jemimah Wei, a 2024 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, is our "GMA" Book Club pick for May.
Set in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore, Wei's novel explores the bonds of family, the price of ambition, and the complexities of sisterhood.
'The Sirens' by Emilia Hart is our 'GMA' Book Club pick for AprilGenevieve Yang is an only child living in a one-room flat with her parents and grandmother in working-class Bedok until Arin arrives, the unexpected child of a grandfather long presumed dead, according to a synopsis.
"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," the synopsis reads. "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."
But when a devastating betrayal drives a wedge between them, Genevieve is forced to weigh ambition against loyalty and personal freedom against family ties.
Set against the backdrop of a rapidly modernizing, winner-take-all society, ''The Original Daughter'' is a powerful debut marked by emotional depth and sharp social insight.
Read an excerpt below and get a copy of the book here.
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This month, we are also teaming up with Little Free Library to give out free copies in Times Square and at 150 locations across the U.S. and Canada. Since 2009, more than 300 million books have been shared in Little Free Libraries across the world. Click here to find a copy of ''The Original Daughter'' at a Little Free Library location near you.
Read along with us and join the conversation all month on our Instagram account, @GMABookClub, and with #GMABookClub.
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Arin was somewhere in Germany when my mother got sick again.
She'd been sick before, but never like this, and I knew it was only a matter of time before she would change her mind and start asking for Arin.
The prospect filled me with dread.
My sister and I hadn't spoken for years, not since she first got famous, not even when my mother was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer a couple of years ago.
Back then, too, I'd been afraid that if things got really bad, my mother would want Arin there.
But we'd had her breasts lopped off, one after the other, and it appeared to have stopped the cancer's spread.
The subject of Arin never came up.
Our relationship hadn't been good for a long time, and in recent years my mother's irreverence had dampened into a more respectable muteness.
But after she recovered, my mother immediately became irritating again.
She'd lost so much weight from the chemotherapy, it didn't seem to matter that she had no breasts.
She sheared off her fluffy black hair, wore nothing but singlets and shorts, and gleefully told everyone passing by the photocopy shop that between this and menopause, she was finally relieved of the trappings of being a woman.
The word she used, one I caught her selecting carefully from the Oxford English Dictionary by our sole electric night-light, was "liberation."
Liberation? When had she ever not acted exactly as she pleased? I felt that she was baiting me; I refused to respond.
Then, a few days ago, I woke to find my mother still in bed beside me, one arm thrown over her face.
"Ma," I said. "It's eight."
She was usually out of the house by six, either at the wet market or doing exercises at Bedok Reservoir Park with her tai chi group before opening the photocopy shop.
To her, sleeping in was something only rich people did, a sign of weak character.
My mother peeked at me from under her arm and didn't say a word. Rare for her to forgo a chance to tease.
I put my face to her wrist, her neck, sniffing.
When I clambered over her body and saw the milky splatter of vomit on the floor, beside the massive potted sansevieria my mother insisted on keeping by our bedside as an air filter, she hid her face again.
"Get dressed," I said after a long moment. "I'm calling Dana."
Dana was her oncologist, one my mother had scammed into friendship.
When they first met, she told Dana she'd been involved with a church deacon years ago who abandoned her when she became pregnant with me, and sweet Dana, in spite of everything one might assume about doctors and intelligence, truly believed God had called her to be the attending physician the day I brought my mother in.
All lies.
My mother wasn't religious, and my father was a taxi driver.
But when I confronted her, she waved me off with a laugh and stayed in touch with Dana, forwarding her prayers and Bible verses on WhatsApp.
It worked. Dana loved my mother.
She dropped by the photocopy shop frequently to bring her food, or just to chat, and even ordered me to bypass the hospital's call center and ring her directly if we needed anything.
When the neighborhood aunties found out, they teased us relentlessly -- of course Su Yang would charm the famously stuffy hospital staff, of course she would be the person to pull the wool over their eyes.
Whoever heard of a doctor giving out her personal number, it was absurd, it wasn't done.
But in all their ribbing there was a sense of glee, as if we had won something.
Not to me. I found my mother's relationship with Dana deceitful; I swore we would never call on this favor.
Yet here we were.
It turned out to be leptomeningeal disease.
Neither my mother nor I had heard the term before, but Dana was crying as she delivered the news.
She knew we couldn't afford surgery; we were still paying off debt from the first one.
Because of her preexisting health conditions, we didn't qualify for the experimental drug trials.
Because my mother belonged to the generation too poor, and therefore too proud, for insurance, there were no secret reserves of cash that could be accessible to us via a sleight of hand in the medical paperwork.
It was a terminal diagnosis. Terminal: that I understood. I wanted to know how long she had.
"Anywhere from three to six months with treatment."
"And without?"
"Four to six weeks."
I was stunned. Beside me, my mother let out a little sigh. "No treatment. I don't want to do that again."
The diagnosis invigorated her. She stood and stretched, then hopped around Dana's office, peering at confidential folders, fingering the stethoscope and green swimming goggles hanging by the door; making Dana laugh, teasing her for crying.
But her voice was too bright, her eyes tired. As soon as we got home, she showered and changed into a fresh set of clothes.
We stared each other down in our bedroom.
"Where are you going?"
"To work."
"They can manage without you, you should rest."
She didn't even stop. "Rest isn't going to cure me. You want me to lie at home like a useless person for the next six weeks?"
I could see her rib cage through the singlet arm holes. She'd gotten so skinny, I hadn't even realized.
She watched my face twist and said quickly: "If you want to help, Genevieve, call your sister."
"She's not my sister."
"I want to see you and Arin together one last time." I kept quiet, and she pushed further. "I never ask you for anything."
It was another one of her untruths; she was full of requests, both vocal and implied. "Promise me."
"No."
"Then you might as well kill me yourself."
She left.
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Audio excerpted with permission of Penguin Random House Audio from "THE ORIGINAL DAUGHTER" by Jemimah Wei, read by Eunice Wong. © Jemimah Wei ℗ 2025 Penguin Random House, LLC.
Excerpted from "The Original Daughter" by Jemimah Wei. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Jemimah Wei.
