Emily X. R. Pan

A New York Times bestseller. 'This brilliantly crafted novel portrays the vast spectrum of love and grief with heart-wrenching beauty and candor. A very special book' - JOHN GREEN, author of The Fault in Our Stars Life, loss, love and art explode in a kaleidoscope of emotions as one girl must learn the truth about her family's past in order to bring peace to the present. For fans of John Green, Jennifer Niven, Jandy Nelson and Nicola Yoon. Leigh Chen Sanders is sixteen when her mother dies by suicide, leaving only a scribbled note: 'I want you to remember'. Leigh doesn't know what it means, but when a red bird appears with a message, she finds herself travelling to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. Leigh is far away from home and far away from Axel, her best friend, who she stupidly kissed on the night her mother died - leaving her with a swell of guilt that she wasn't home, and a heavy heart, thinking she may have destroyed the one good thing left in her life. Overwhelmed by grief, Leigh retreats into her art and into her memories, where colours collide and the rules of reality are broken. The only thing Leigh is certain about is that she must find out the truth. She must remember. With lyrical prose and magical elements, Emily X.R. Pan's stunning debut novel alternates between past and present, romance and despair, as one girl attempts to find herself through family history, art, friendship, and love.

The Astonishing Colour of After

Ian Brakspear

“You love who you love There's no changing that. You do your loving whenever, wherever you wish"

Hold your finger to the sky with so much force it lengthens like a spine. Look up to the point of it and beyond

There. That tiny patch of the world, no bigger than the tip of your finger. At first glance, it mightjust look like one flat color.

But it's much more complex than that. Squint. See the daubs of lilac. The streak of sage no wider than a hyphen. That butterscotch smear and the faint wash of carnelian. All of them coming together to swirl at the point just above your finger.

Breathe them in. Let them settle in your lungs. Those are the colors of right now.

🎠

We try so hard to make these little time capsules. Memories strung up just so, like holiday lights, casting the perfect glow in the perfect tones. But that picking and choosing what to look at, what to put on display—that’s not the true nature of remembering.

Memory is a mean thing, slicing at you from the harshest angles, dipping your consciousness into the wrong colors again and again.

To remember is to grieve for the hands that once caressed my face, leaving a trace on my cheeks that were once loved by the departed’s presence.

And I’ll grieve for as long as I remember you.

I’m sick of remembering. Weary of the shadows and storms being tugged to the surface of my mind, mauve spilling into raw umber. Tired of reliving the past, the mistakes.

Once upon a time we were the standard colors of a rainbow, cheery and certain of ourselves. At some point we all began to stumble into the in-betweens, the murky colors made dark and complicated by resentment and quiet anger. 

At some point, my mother slid so off track she sank into hues of gray, a world drawn only in shadows.

“Sisters are very lucky,” Feng says quietly. “They get to be family and they also get to be best friends. Even in the afterlife, I think they recognize the presence of the other better than anyone else.”

Here is my mother, with wings instead of hands, and feathers instead of hair. Here is my mother, the reddest of brilliant reds, the color of my love and my fear, all of my fiercest feelings trailing after her in the sky like the tail of a comet.

Memories that tell a story, if you look hard enough. Because the purpose of memory, I would argue, is to remind us how to live.

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