The Good Morning America book club has selected Jemimah Wei’s The Original Daughter as its May pick.
Wei’s debut novel, published Tuesday by Doubleday, follows two sisters in Singapore who first meet when one is 8 and the other slightly younger; they later become estranged after a betrayal. A critic for Kirkus called the book “a moving debut novel about sisterhood, ambition, and the quest to become one’s true self.”
GMA’s Eva Pilgrim announced the novel’s selection on the morning show, and interviewed Wei, who was recently named as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 honorees.
Asked why she chose to focus on the topic of sisterhood, Wei said, “When I first started writing this novel, I wasn’t thinking that hard about sisters. I was thinking about the dynamic of a returned or given-away child, and that is really common in my part of the world.…I always thought to myself, What does that mean about chosen family? What does that mean about choosing to keep the people in your life over and over again every single day?”
Pilgrim noted that Wei is also from Singapore, and asked her how much of the story was inspired by her own life.
“I find it a great privilege to be able to immortalize the world that I know in print,” Wei said. “I wanted to put in as much of the Singapore I know and love as possible before it gets lost to progress or lost to renovation. And so I had a lot of fun with it.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
