The Memory Museum

Lin debuts with a perceptive story collection about the unsettled lives of characters who were born in China and are now scattered around the world. Often, her protagonists observe life from a distance, such as the petty thieves looking for victims on the streets of Shanghai in “You Won’t Read This in the News” or the obsessed woman in Pittsburgh spying on her lover and masseur in “Shangri-La.” An elderly woman living in late 21st-century New Zealand who was raised in 1990s China by parents who met at the Tiananmen Square protests thinks back on childhood visits to her grandpa’s village in “Scenes from Childhood.” A couple in the middle of a divorce in “Magic, or Something Less Assuring” ends up on vacation together in Morocco. In the title entry, Beijing technicians form a bond over sense memories collected and stored in cyberspace sometime in the future. Lin evokes her characters’ abstract thoughts and feelings with simple, matter-of-fact writing, as when the protagonist of “Shangri-La” remains silent years later about her affair with the masseuse, fearful of “how her memory might change if she tried to put it into words.” Each of these stories conveys an indelible emotional truth. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, Gernert Co. (Apr.)