Excerpt from All That's Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Ky had restrained herself from saying more. She'd bitten her tongue as thoughts tumbled through her head. Of neighbors not showing up to the funeral. Of her parents' coworkers—who usually demanded wedding invitations from people they hardly knew—conveniently being too busy to swing by to pay their respects. Of their playing games of mah-jongg with one another, eating boiled peanuts while gossiping about the good boy, the smart boy, the painfully unlucky boy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She saw them shaking their heads as they spoke of how the world wasn't what it used to be, how ruthless people had become, how indiscriminate luck was in a town like Cabramatta, in a country as confounding as Australia. And it made her angry. Ky alternated between clenching her jaw and grinding her teeth when she thought of what people might be saying about her brother, because what the hell did they know? Bad luck was meaningless, defeatist. Bad luck was throwing your hands up before you'd even tried—it was a footnote, something that happened to other people. Bad luck made Ky want to loosen her strained jaw and scream at her absent neighbors. But she knew that even if she tried, no noise would come out. She could only ever fantasize; she could never really be heard.

People would come, Ky's mother said again, her thick hands pushing and grabbing and twisting the dough as though her love for her children were measured by her sweat and exertion—how much food she made, how springy the buns were once steamed. They would come for her son, she repeated, and it would be embarrassing not to have enough food at the wake, and the family couldn't afford to be embarrassed any more.

Ky wanted her mother to be right. Denny deserved a crowd. More than a crowd, he deserved the presence of every person he would have met had his life not ended so soon. In the days leading up to the funeral, Ky caught herself daydreaming about hundreds, no, thousands of strangers making pilgrimages to Cabramatta for her brother. In her imagination, they crowded into her parents' driveway, spilled out onto the sidewalk, filled the neighboring streets, and shouted about how badly they wished they'd known him. But even though the daydreams were her own creation, she kept losing control of them, her mind allowing Minnie, whom she hadn't seen in years, not since they'd had the worst fight of her life, to appear and shift the focus to Ky. Collectively, the imagined pilgrims would turn on Ky, demanding to know where she'd been, why she wasn't there for Denny in the end, how she could be so selfish as to abandon her baby brother like that. Fantasy Ky would freeze, her daydream tongue getting fat and useless in her parched daydream mouth, until she forced herself to snap out of it.

Back in the living room, Mr. Dickson stared at Ky, expecting her to show him to the kitchen. Ky stared back—she usually knew what she was meant to do, what was socially appropriate, but she was slow to act. Sometimes she felt like she was watching TV instead of occupying her own body. And right now the thought of having to translate Mr. Dickson's condolences to her parents—not to mention the awkward, stilted conversation that would follow—made her want to excuse herself and make a run for it, out of the house, down the street, in any direction, breaking the sound barrier, eventually escaping her own skin.

"They're busy right now," Ky said, not exactly lying. Her mother remained in a cooking frenzy. The last time she saw her father, about thirty minutes earlier, he was in his funerary black slacks and white shirt—barely discernible from his regular work clothes as a bank teller—lying straight on Denny's twin-size mattress. "Plus, their English isn't great."

"I would still like to—"

"Here, have some food," Ky said. "Mum spent ages making these, so she'd be happy if you ate it."

Excerpted from All That's Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien. Copyright © 2022 by Tracey Lien. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.