Little Fires Everywhere
In carefully planned Shaker Heights, Ohio, Elena Richardson takes in a bohemian artist named Mia and her daughter Pearl as tenants, and the friction between their two households quickly unsettles her four children and the custody battle dividing the town. Celeste Ng uses a house fire in the opening pages as a flash-forward that hangs over the book as she slowly reconstructs the grievances, secrets, and inherited ideas of motherhood that brought the Richardsons and the Warrens to that morning. The novel is both a study of planned-community respectability and a quiet argument about who gets to decide what a good mother looks like.
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What you might want to know about Little Fires Everywhere
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In 1990s Shaker Heights, the perfectly run Richardson household rents a duplex to an artist and her teenage daughter. Months later, the Richardson home is on fire. The book runs back to figure out why.
Yes. Hulu released a Little Fires Everywhere limited series in 2020, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. The show is largely faithful to the novel with some expanded character development.
No. Little Fires Everywhere is a standalone, separate from Everything I Never Told You and Our Missing Hearts. Each of Celeste Ng's novels stands on its own.
Little Fires Everywhere was written by Celeste Ng, published in 2017 by Penguin Press.
Little Fires Everywhere is 384 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Little Fires Everywhere takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
Little Fires Everywhere is a standalone novel by Celeste Ng, not part of a series.
Little Fires Everywhere is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
