Kangkang Li Kovacs with Daniel Tam-Claiborne — 'Nothing to My Name'

Inspired by the author’s own family, this multi-generational saga explores how women survive the tsunamis of history.
About this Event

Third Place Books welcomes Kangkang Li Kovacs to our Ravenna store for a conversation about her new novel , which follows three generations of Chinese women as they bear witness to history, exploring suffering and dignity, loss and reckoning, and the unexpected joy that sustains family bonds. Daniel Tam-Claiborne, author of , joins in conversation.

This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured books!

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About Nothing to My Name. . .

Inspired by the author’s own family history, and spanning the past hundred years of Chinese history, this multi-generational family saga explores how women survive the tsunamis of history

Nothing to My Name chronicles the intertwined fates of three generations of Chinese women: Ah Xue, Mimosa, and Fei. The Grandmother, Ah Xue, witnesses the rise of the Communist Revolution while earning a meager living combing the hair of the few wealthy ladies in her small fishing village. Mimosa, the Mother, grows up in the shadow of her parents’ struggles as the growing tension of the Cultural Revolution threatens to pull their family apart. And Fei Fei, the Daughter, brought up as a “boy” by her activist father, grapples with gender identity in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Awash in the tides of societal upheaval, Ah Xue, Mimosa, and Fei Fei are all driven by the instinct to survive, weathering hardship that splinters the boundary between the personal and the political. For readers of sweeping upmarket book club fiction like Pachinko and Homegoing, Nothing to My Name is a braided history of suffering and dignity, of loss and reckoning, and of the unexpected joy that sustains family bonds.

Kangkang Li Kovacs grew up in Nanchang, China, and came to the United States for her graduate studies. After earning a PhD in nuclear physics at the University of Virginia and teaching math and physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, she decided to pursue her passion for writing. Kovacs received her MFA at the College of Charleston. Her writing has been published in Jellyfish Review and swamp pink literary magazine, among other outlets. Her debut novel, Nothing to My Name, a multi-generational family saga that explores personal reckoning and gender identity among social upheavals in China, will be released by Viking, Penguin Random House on June 23, 2026.

Daniel Tam-Claiborne is a multiracial writer, multimedia producer, and nonprofit director. His debut novel, Transplants (Simon & Schuster, 2025), was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and longlisted for the 2026 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. He is the author of the short story collection What Never Leaves, and his writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, HuffPost, Catapult, Literary Hub, Off Assignment, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, he has also received awards and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Poets & Writers, Bread Loaf, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, and others. Daniel holds degrees from Oberlin College, Yale University, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

About Third Place Books

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.