Natural Beauty
A Novel
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Natural Beauty
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Narrated by:
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Carolyn Kang
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Written by:
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Ling Ling Huang
About this listen
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Fiction
Longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
Sly, surprising, and razor-sharp, Natural Beauty follows a young musician into an elite, beauty-obsessed world where perfection comes at a staggering cost.
Our narrator produces a sound from the piano no one else at the Conservatory can. She employs a technique she learned from her parents—also talented musicians—who fled China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. But when an accident leaves her parents debilitated, she abandons her future for a job at a high-end beauty and wellness store in New York City.
Holistik is known for its remarkable products and procedures—from remoras that suck out cheap Botox to eyelash extensions made of spider silk—and her new job affords her entry into a world of privilege and gives her a long-awaited sense of belonging. She becomes transfixed by Helen, the niece of Holistik’s charismatic owner, and the two strike up a friendship that hazily veers into more. All the while, our narrator is plied with products that slim her thighs, smooth her skin, and lighten her hair. But beneath these creams and tinctures lies something sinister.
A piercing, darkly funny debut, Natural Beauty explores questions of consumerism, self-worth, race, and identity—and leaves readers with a shocking and unsettling truth.
Critic Reviews
A Good Morning America Buzz Pick
A New York Times Editors’ Choice
One of WIRED's Best Books of 2023
A SELF Well-Read Book Club Pick
One of the New York Post's "best new books to read"
One of Bustle's “36 Best New Books Of Spring & Summer 2023”
One of the New York Public Library's "Engrossing Thrillers To Put Into Your Beach Bag This Summer"
Featured in Book Riot’s “25 Best Horror Books of 2023”
One of Powell’s Books “Hot Book Summer” recommendations
One of Katie Couric Media’s “13 Books by AAPI Authors To Read This May and Beyond”
An April LibraryReads Pick
“Her talents…harmonize most seamlessly when she writes about music, managing the near-impossible feat of crafting descriptions of the compositions that are as airy and adroit as the melodies themselves. And she is at her best when she skewers the narcissistic, corrosive version of self-care that can be mistaken for empowerment…The novel is a meditation on vanity, the ways in which the pursuit of physical beauty can betray the other sources of beauty in one’s life, and how horror can lurk beneath the surface of even the most poreless skin.”–Jazmine Hughes, The New York Times Book Review
“Absorbing . . . Natural Beauty starts out frothy, offering an enticing dip into how tech could beautify and perfect our bodies and faces in the near future . . . It quickly veers into subversive horror, turning into a cautionary tale on societal themes we’re currently seeing IRL.”–Vogue
“The promise of self-improvement is darkly seductive. In Ling Ling Huang’s Natural Beauty […] a former pianist working at a biotech-funded wellness store initially thrills at her regimen’s effects (defined eyelids, opalescent skin). By the end, her dismissal of rigid aesthetics is what lingers: ‘That fine line between beauty and ugliness, ripeness and rot, is what keeps an audience listening with held breath.’”—Vanity Fair, “The Pursuit of Beauty Fuels a Dark Streak in Fiction”