Tomb Sweeping

As a general rule, satisfying short story collections are the unicorns of the book world. So often they fall into the same traps: one story always feels too long, or they all start to blend together, or you’re wracked with frustration over a story’s inconclusiveness. Tomb Sweeping is a gorgeous, rich, moving antidote to all of these problems: a meticulously layered fifteen-course meal that left me sated and pondering life’s bigger questions.

Throughout these stories, we meet a vast array of characters, from a young woman holed up alone in an increasingly eerie mansion to a bored housewife who creates her own income stream in the form of an underground gambling ring. Each story does an exquisite job of building an entire world in just a few pages. As we travel the globe from the U.S. to China, Alexandra Chang captures the perfect tone for each tale: sometimes cheeky, sometimes yearning, but always deeply heartfelt and empathic.

This collection also does a brilliant job of illuminating the subtleties of societal expectations and seems to relish its characters’ moments of vulnerability and weirdness responding to these strict, so often unspoken guidelines. Chang manages to tackle the idea of what it means to be holistically satisfied—in life, in love—across time periods and tracks how much our relationships to happiness have changed the more our lives have become complicated by technology. Tomb Sweeping is that rare book that is better consumed in small bites, which is why it’s our look-back pick for 2023. I invite you to savor it.

Compelling and perceptive, Tomb Sweeping probes the loyalties we hold: to relatives, to strangers, and to ourselves. In stories set across the US and Asia, Alexandra Chang immerses us in the lives of immigrant families, grocery store employees, expecting parents, and guileless lab assistants.

A woman known only to her neighbors as “the Asian recycling lady” collects bottles from the streets she calls home. A young college grad ponders the void left from a broken friendship. An unfulfilled housewife in Shanghai finds a secret outlet for her ambitions in an undercover gambling den. Two strangers become something more through the bond of mistaken identity.

These characters, adeptly attuned to the mystery of living, invite us to consider whether it is possible for anyone to entirely do right by another. Tomb Sweeping brims with remarkable skill and talent in every story, keeping a definitive pulse on loss, community, and what it means to feel fully alive.