Underspin

Underspin is as zippy as an Olympic final * Financial Times *
A staggeringly good debut, written with élan, compassion and wit, that takes the world of professional table-tennis and serves us a story about prestige, abuse, ambition, loyalty and the terrible results of feeling surveilled by the eye of high expectations. – Kaliane Bradley * author of The Ministry of Time *
Zhao’s Underspin is an eruption of a debut. This novel displays a wondrous ability that renders both the central sport and lives that weave around it with meticulous precision and tremendous heart. The beauty of sport the spirit of desire and the sacrifice required for greatness are all captured here in this stunner. – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah * National Book Award and Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize-shortlisted author of Chain-Gang All-Stars *
A complex and dynamic tragedy, carefully rendering the many lives that are drawn into the orbit of a rising star. Zhao, much like Underspin’s protagonist, wields great talent and skill – Nicola Dinan * author of Bellies *
Beautifully written, funny, and tragic, Underspin is a triumph of a novel * Chicago Review of Books *
E.Y. Zhao arrives on the literary scene like Minerva emerging from the head of Zeus: fully formed, formidable, and a superior force to be reckoned with. Who knew the world needed a table-tennis novel? Except that it is not a table tennis novel, or not just one – it is, indelibly, what the novel has always been about: the tangle of human life; error, power, damage, striving; the complicated ties that connect us in a web at once tensile, tough, and frangible. – Neel Mukherjee * Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Lives of Others and Choice *
Challengers, but make it table tennis … I love a character portrait and I love a bildungsroman and I love a sports story that isn’t really about sports. * Lit Hub *
Like Challengers did to tennis last year, Underspin might do for table tennis. Zhao’s debut is wildly ambitious and searingly brilliant, jolting the reader with devastation, nostalgia, embarrassment, prestige, and sex—all in a completely unexpected field. Underspin is meaty with brain and brawn, radically alive in surprising ways. A tremendous writer of fiction is born * Soft Union *
Zhao’s finest victory is encapsulating both the highest highs and lowest lows of Ryan’s life with the same amount of complexity, nuance, and detail. Underspin showcases the pressure, isolation, and loneliness of high-level sports … [A] smashing debut * Shelf Awareness *
Andre Agassi’s Open meets Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad in this wildly exciting, whipsmart and beautiful novel of a tragic table tennis star, told by those who were closest to him. Mobile, adventurous, and deeply imaginative, it’s a stunner of a debut * Our Culture *

E Y Zhao is a writer from St. Louis, Missouri. Her work appears in The Georgia Review, Electric Lit, and Chicago Review of Books, among others. She edits fiction for Joyland Magazine.

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