'Everything I Never Told You' is wrapped in family secrets

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet."

Celeste Ng's debut novels opens with an absence. The Lee family's middle daughter, Lydia, is missing.

Even once her body is found in a nearby lake, the mystery of what happened threatens to crack the family down the middle.

The Lee family stands out in their neighborhood, not just for their grief but also because an interracial marriage was still a rare sight in suburban Ohio in the 1970s. James Lee is Chinese American, while his wife Marilyn is white. The tension of being different weighs heavily on each of the family members.

For Ng, the novel addresses some of her own ghosts. Her quiet Shaker Heights, Ohio neighborhood was struck by a string of tragic deaths when she was growing up: Three young women were murdered over 10 years — each in a separate, violent incident.

"I kept finding myself thinking about the mystery," Ng said. "But also about how their families move on."

Ng also drew on her own experience enduring racism as the child of Chinese immigrants in Ohio. In the book, "every racial incident, with the exception of one, is drawn from something I experienced or someone I know experienced," she said.

Raised in a family of scientists, writing was not the obvious path for Ng, but she pursued it with a fierce passion. Her debut landed on the New York Times' list of 100 Notable Books of 2014.

"Both science and writing are driven by a 'what if?' spirit," said Ng. "In science, you're trying to figure out how the world works through experiments. I think that's what writers do too."

The paperback of "Everything I Never Told You" was released this month.

Ng will read from the book on Tuesday, May 26 at 7 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble in Edina.