The Fourth Daughter: A Novel

📚 Why We Recommend It​

The neon of New York and the moss of a Fujian ancestral home have always pulled at Lin Meiyue’s life. As the unwanted fourth daughter, she grew up feeling like an unresolved piece on a chessboard—until her mother pressed a jade pendant with a stranger’s name into her hand on her deathbed, sending her on a roots-seeking journey across the Pacific. In the rainy season of southern Fujian, buried memories unfold like damp scrolls: lovers separated by 1940s wars, struggles aboard 1970s smuggling ships, silent sacrifices in a modern immigrant family… every page drips with tears and pain spanning generations.​
A grandmother’s old trunk holds yellowed love letters; a father’s evasive gaze hides unspoken guilt. And in the cultural clashes with her New York boyfriend, Meiyue finally understands that “family” is never a chain of blood, but a bond stretching across mountains and seas. With prose as delicate as silk, Lyn Liao Butler weaves the identity struggles of an immigrant descendant with a family’s hidden truths, letting anyone caught between foreign lands and homeland find echoes of themselves in these pages.​
If you’re drawn to stories of individual struggle and reconciliation amid historical tides, or crave the warmth of blood ties in family sagas, this book is like a slow-brewed tea—lingering on the palate, rich with the sweetness of love and forgiveness that transcends time.