“I’m stubborn as hell,” is Lisa Ko’s pithy self-description in the “About Me” section of her blog. Herself the first U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants, Ko, forty-two, drew upon a large percentage of bullheadedness reserves in gestating, writing and distributing The Leavers, her much-discussed first novel, published this spring by Algonquin Books after winning the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. In May, Ko discussed her plot, her characters, and her process in pithy conversation with Kaitlyn Greenidge (whose own well-wrought debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, received similarly enthusiastic critical approbation upon its 2016 publication), before responding to questions from the audience that attended the encounter at the Barnes & Noble branch on Manhattan’s East 86th Street. —Miwa Messer, Director, Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers

Kaitlyn Greenidge: Talk about the story that inspired the book.

Lisa Ko: I started writing The Leavers eight very long years ago. It was inspired by an article I’d read in the New York Times about an undocumented immigrant who had been in a detention center in Florida for over two years. What struck me most about her story is that she had a young son she had tried to bring into the U.S., and he’d gotten caught by immigration and adopted by a Canadian family. This really shocked me, and I started finding out about all these other undocumented immigrant parents who had their U.S.-born children taken away from them by the U.S. courts, adopted by mainly white American families while they were being deported or detained. It just seemed to bring up a lot about how we look at immigrant bodies, why do the parents have to go and the kids had to stay — what that says about who should be assimilated and who couldn’t.

So I started writing about a character named Holly, who paid fifty grand to get smuggled into the U.S. from China. She has a son named Deming, and one day, when he’s eleven years old, she goes to work in New York City and she never comes home. After that, Deming gets adopted by a white family, moves upstate from the Bronx; his name is changed to Daniel Wilkinson, and ten years later he starts to look for his mom. So the book is really about mother and son and what happens to them before and after their separation, and also it’s his search for belonging and family at home.

KG: I was struck that this woman, whose real-life story was so horrible, gets to have an afterlife in your novel. That’s a wonderful thing that novels can do, different from any other way of writing. Also, as I was reading, I was reminded again and again about how society has decided to classify certain bodies; we seem to think that certain people are allowed the natural benefits of parenthood and other people are not. This book plays with that question a lot.

Can you talk about writing about motherhood in particular, and writing about a mother?

LK: My character, Polly, who is Deming’s mom, is sort of ambivalent. It’s interesting that she’s not a very likable character. I like reading about unlikable women. Why do we have to be likable? We can be human. We can be ambivalent, and full of different complexities. I tried to create as human a character as I could, putting some of my own ambivalence and fear about motherhood, while also thinking about somebody in her position. She’s someone who, as a teenager, had the drive to leave this small town in China and make it all the way to New York. She’s a bit of a badass and a rebel; it makes sense that would be her character.

KG: It’s also about the relationship between a mother and a son, which is tricky to write about — a bond that isn’t explored much in fiction.

LK: The book started off with Polly as the main character. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that she had this son. That became the compelling story, one I wanted to keep going with, imagining what it was like for the kids in these real-life stories to grow up in adoptive families, knowing that their parents wanted to take them but weren’t able to. What was it like for them to grow up in these white communities? What was it like to have that conflicted sense of identity and displacement? So I started writing more about his character, and it grew on me. He’s sort of a lost kid. He’s searching for belonging and searching for his mom as well, which parallels his search for identity.

KG: What is so palpable when he’s young is his fascination with his mother. She’s almost kind of a superstar for him.

LK: Yeah, and she was gone for a while, too. She can’t take care of him as a single mom, so she sends him back to China to live with his grandfather — which happens frequently with a lot of recent Chinese immigrants. So when she comes back, it’s like he’s meeting her for the first time.

KG: When you’re working on a project that long, it’s so helpful to find different communities to work in. What different writing communities did you find when you were working on the book?

LK: I started writing this book in my MFA program at City College. I also wrote it juggling many, many jobs, or during my lunch breaks. I went to residencies and sublet my apartment when I could. I’ve been part of a very important writing community through VONA, Voices of Our Nations Arts, which is a national writing workshop for writers of color. They’ve been a big support; we’ve traded work a lot as well.

KG: How did you start writing?

LK: I started writing stories when I was five years old. I was like a super-weird only child and lived in my head a lot — like I think a lot of writers do. I had a lot of imaginary friends.

KG: When did you first feel that writing was something you could do and wanted to put out into the world?

LK: It took a while to get to that path. It’s not like you grow up in an immigrant family being told, “Yeah, you should really write some fiction.” That’s like, “so your ancestors suffered for you to write a novel and not make any money . . . ” I did it on the sly. I took writing classes in college and published a few stories. But I didn’t see it as a career. It was something that I did and did and did and did, and kept doing.

KG: What’s surprised you most as you’ve gone through this book publishing process, or book-coming-out-into-the-world process?

LK: It’s been super-gratifying and amazing to see people read it and connect with it. That’s been beyond my wildest dreams. You write it in your head, alone in your apartment, and then all of a sudden a real human being is reading the words and quoting it back to you.

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In addition to being the most exciting, suspenseful, Machiavellian book I have read this year, The Force, Don Winslow’s nineteenth novel, could serve as the set text for an entire course on ethics. In its pages notions of right and wrong, justice and law, integrity and duplicity, professional duty and personal obligation are dissected, extrapolated, and rearranged in every sort of macabre permutation.

Blue-eyed, six-foot-two, thirty-eight-year-old Detective Sergeant Denny Malone is the Staten Island–born hero-cop son of a hero-cop father and the leader of New York’s elite Manhattan North Special Task Force. Tough, smart, and committed, the four-man “pack of alphas” are “the 1 percent of the 1 percent of the 1 percent” of the city’s 38,000-member police force. They are — were — “Da Force,” blowing “through the city like a cold, harsh, fast, and violent wind, scouring the streets and alleys, the playgrounds, parks, and projects, scraping away the trash and the filth, a predatory storm blowing away the predators.” All crime is their province, but drugs and guns are their special targets — and it is drugs and guns that have landed Malone where we first meet him: behind bars, a calamity that has taken eighteen years to develop and almost 500 pages to explore.

Manhattan North Special Task Force is made up of Malone, in whose voice — filtered through a behind-the-eyeballs third person — the story is told; Phil Russo, his best pal from Staten Island; and the trilby-wearing, cigar-chomping Bill Montague, a.k.a. Big Monty. They have recently lost a fourth member, “Billy O,” killed during a raid, and he has been replaced by Dave Levin, a man who has a lot to learn (and accept) about “the Job,” as they call it. The veterans — Malone, Russo, and Monty — are honorable men by their own lights and have been frustrated by their inability to nail the big boys in the drug-and-gun trade, the men who preserve their territory through beatings, mutilations, and murders. It is only a matter of Realpolitik, then, to cook up phony reasons for entering apartments without warrants, plant guns on people they know to be criminals, or “testilie” in court in order to put the bad guys away.

The men are honorable, too, as they maintain with increasing elasticity, in accepting the gratitude of the community, gravitating from taking small freebies (coffee and donuts) to larger ones (meals and tickets) to accepting fatter and fatter envelopes of cash for various missions, on to pocketing thousands of dollars secured during drug raids. Is this wrong? Malone, finally confronting a big mess of his own making, examines his once-flexible conscience: “Told yourself it was different because you were robbing drug dealers instead of banks.” Even the ultimate: absconding with several million dollars’ worth of cocaine and selling it off to be peddled on the streets the Task Force is supposed to police, fits – barely — into the code. After all, the money will be used for their children’s college and for the survivors of their dead comrade. They’re “doing the right thing.”

The one unforgivable breach of the code is ratting on another cop, and the most grievous version of this is to rat on your partners. It is a thing of horrifying beauty to see how Winslow sets up a nightmarish sequence of traps and snares to place Malone in a situation that would seem to demand it. After years of fearing NYPD’s investigative Internal Affairs Bureau, Malone gets nabbed by the feds, and pretty soon he’s playing a fast-paced, down-and-dirty game of hardball with New York City’s power brokers, their “faces full of wealth, grit, cynicism, greed and energy.”

That this fine novel will be a movie is not in doubt. It is filled with exhilarating details of weaponry, court maneuvers, and New York’s lowlife, and is punctuated by blood-rousing action scenes. It is also leavened along the way with jokes and nicely cynical wisecracks. (“When the pope came to NYC, Malone wanted to arrest him.”)

But above all, Winslow brings the same mastery of the anatomy of corruption to this book that he brought to the Mexican drug trade and our ruinous “war on drugs” in The Power of the Dog and The Cartel, his brilliant duo of narco-thrillers. Laying bare the intertangled ganglia of criminal enterprise, law enforcement, the justice system, and politics, he displays a deep and unsavory knowledge of how things work in NYC, from the distribution of street territory among various ethnic criminal gangs to the running of the “Iron Pipeline,” whereby guns from southern states with negligible gun laws make their way up Interstate 95 into the arsenals of northern crime bosses and onto the streets. Finally — and, if I may say so, gloriously — he illustrates the sanitized involvement of real estate moguls, judicial officials, and the mayor’s office in the whole dirty business. And, even if the novel’s end, a melodramatic Götterdämmerung, is not entirely believable, it is perfectly satisfying.

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