Alice Evelyn Yang Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Alice Evelyn Yang is a Chinese-American writer. She is from Norfolk, Virginia and is based in New York.

Her shorter work has been featured in Apogee, AAWW’s the Margins, The Rumpus, and the Michigan Quarterly Review, among others. She also received the 2022-2023 Jesmyn Ward Prize from MQR.

Alice spent her junior year studying English literature at the University of Oxford’s Hertford College. She attended Northwestern University and graduated with a BA in creative writing in 2020, minoring in Environmental Policy and Culture. In 2022, she finished her MFA in fiction at Columbia University. There she was given the Felipe De Alba Fellowship for excellence in first-year writing. She was also nominated for the Henfield Prize, which focuses on recognizing the best work in fiction done by a second-year student.

Her work looks at themes of immigration, environmental racism, intergenerational trauma, and critical fabulation. Her first novel to come out was titled A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing.

A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing is a 2026 novel by Alice Evelyn Yang. This is the debut novel from this author and a fresh voice in fiction that readers won’t want to miss out on! It was even longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction. If you’ve been looking for something new to enjoy that is completely unique and creative enough that no other book resembles it, check out this novel and see what you think!

This is a dark and magical realist family saga that follows along and goes through the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, the Cultural Revolution, and all the way to the present day, looking into the different effects that intergenerational trauma can have as well as colonialism’s legacy and how fate can sometimes be a thing that feels impossible to escape.

Main character Qianze is a young woman who has not seen her father in over a decade. It has been eleven years since he decided to walk out of her life, something that he chose to do on the night that she turned fourteen years old. Just like that, he was out the door and had gone without a trace of him to be found.

Years later, Qianze gets a call that she was not expecting. It appears that there is a guy standing on the porch of her childhood home and is asking after her. But once she lays her eyes on him, Qianze feels that this is not the father that she remembers. He is older, more fragile, and is haunted by a prophecy that is half-forgotten.

Qianze is trying to deal with what she owes this almost stranger and while she does, Ba starts telling stories from his past. He covers over the bloody days that he spent as a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, his mother’s youth and life under Japanese occupation, and is circling around the prophecy that he came to deliver.

Qianze has always wanted to know more about the history of his family. Ba ends up showing her the truth and shows more about the past than she could have imagined, giving way to a far darker picture than she would have thought. Along the way, she discovers that she is being bothered by odd visions. Fox spirits come after her on the evening commute, a scary jackalope haunts her in her nightmares, and the prophecy is looming over them and seemingly getting closer.

Covering different continents and decades, this debut novel from Alice Evelyn Yang is a stunner. The story evokes folklore and atmospheric prose to take a look at the legacy that colonialism has left as taking place through the eyes of three different generations.

Interesting and compelling, this engaging first novel from Alice Evelyn Yang is one that cannot be missed. Grab a copy of A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing and find out why so many readers are raving about this book. Perfect for reading on your own and a wonderful book club selection, this debut shows why so many are excited about Yang’s appearance on the scene and why they are eagerly looking forward to what she writes next.