Published in 2025
280 pages
Lyn Liao Butler is a Taiwanese American author of thrillers, upmarket fiction, and rom-coms. Her thriller, Someone Else’s Life, was an Amazon bestseller, and her second book, Red Thread of Fate, was a finalist in the WFWA Star Awards for 2023. Before becoming an author, she was a professional ballet and modern dancer and is still a fitness and yoga instructor. She and her family, including two rescue dogs and a myriad of foster animals, divide their time between New York and Kauai.
What is this book about?
In Taiwan, the bond between grandmother and granddaughter opens up a healing world for them both in an inspiring family saga about the comfort of food, untold histories, and indomitable mother love.
Chef Liv Kuo’s star is on the rise…until a traumatic incident leaves her emotionally unable to venture outside her Manhattan apartment. But an unexpected reason to break free comes from Ah-Ma, Liv’s beloved grandmother in Taiwan. Ah-Ma needs Liv’s help in finding her fourth daughter, taken from her when the girl was an infant. After all these years, it seems impossible. It’s also a mystery: Ah-Ma’s fourth daughter is an aunt Liv never even knew existed.
After landing in Taiwan, Liv hears the heartbreaking story of her grandmother’s plight in a country once under martial law, of choices made for her, and of the hopeful search for a lost girl that has endured for more than sixty years. Like the enriching food and traditions that bind Liv and Ah-Ma, their journey for answers brings them together.
And it’s a quest that turns up both a precious old cookbook and a tale of fatal betrayal that shakes everything Liv believed about her family—revelations that could also give her the courage to face the trauma she left behind.
