Goodbye, Vitamin

An O: the Oprah Magazine and Amazon.com Best Book of 2017
'Khong is a magician ... Brilliant' Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
'Khong's first novel sneaks up on you - just like life, illness and heartbreak. And love. A million small, human and often deeply funny details gather force to tell a tale that is ultimately, incredibly poignant' Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man
Ruth is thirty and her life is falling apart: she and her fiancé are moving house, but he's moving out to live with another woman; her career is going nowhere; and then she learns that her father, a history professor beloved by his students, has Alzheimer's. At Christmas, her mother begs her to stay on and help. For a year.
Goodbye, Vitamin is the wry, beautifully observed story of a woman at a crossroads, as Ruth and her friends attempt to shore up her father's career; she and her mother obsess over the ambiguous health benefits - in the absence of a cure - of dried jellyfish supplements and vitamin pills; and they all try to forge a new relationship with the brilliant, childlike, irascible man her father has become.
'A beautifully written debut, dreamy and funny ... flawless' Independent
?'Biting, funny and poignant and makes you wish you'd thought of writing it first' Stylist, '50 Unmissable Books'
'Like a chain of fairy lights in the darkness' Financial Times
'One of the funniest elegiac novels I have ever read' David Leavitt, author of The Lost Language of Cranes

Rachel Khong studied at Yale and the University of Florida. Her fiction and non-fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Believer, Pitchfork, Village Voice and Lucky Peach. In 2013, she was named one of Refinery29's 30 under 30. Goodbye, Vitamin is her first novel.