At the heart of Abigail Savitch-Lew’s striking debut lies a single question: who set fire to the tenements on Livonia Avenue in 1978, and why?

In the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, two apartment buildings burn to the ground one summer night, leaving one person dead and many more displaced. Rumors swirl, and blame quickly settles on Mr. Wong, the quiet owner of the Chinese restaurant down the block. But as the decades unfold, the truth becomes far more complex.

The story moves through four generations of the Wong family. Koon Lai, an immigrant restaurateur, builds a life out of hard work and hope on Livonia Avenue. His son Richard dreams of his own version of the American Dream but feels trapped by his father’s sacrifices. Jason, a poet in 1970s Brooklyn, longs to escape the weight of family history and finds himself swept up in the counterculture. And in the present day, Jason’s daughter Sadie returns to Brownsville as a journalist determined to uncover what really happened the night the tenements burned.

Interwoven with their stories is Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, a lifelong activist and former tenant of the buildings that were destroyed. Lina has spent decades fighting for her community and now leads a campaign to create a community land trust on Livonia Avenue, hoping to reclaim the future that fire once took away. There's a lot of characters, but it's mostly Sadi and Lina's stories.

Livonia Chow Mein is both a mystery and a multigenerational epic, tracing how families and neighborhoods rise, fall, and remake themselves through time. Savitch-Lew writes with warmth and precision about belonging, displacement, and the fragile promise of the American Dream.
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Livonia Chow Mein is a stunning, generous debut that takes what could have been a single neighborhood mystery—a 1978 fire on Livonia Avenue that kills one tenant and displaces dozens—and turns it into a sweeping, deeply human epic of Brownsville, Brooklyn across a century. Abigail Savitch-Lew follows four generations of the Wong family—from immigrant restaurateur Koon Lai, to his striver son Richard, to Jason, a 1970s poet swept up in bohemian counterculture and unwitting gentrification, and finally Jason’s daughter Sadie, a 21st-century journalist determined to uncover the truth about the blaze—while also centering Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, the Latina organizer who lost her home in that same fire and spends decades fighting for a community land trust on Livonia Avenue. The result is both propulsive and reflective: a layered portrait of Chinese, Black, and Jewish residents whose lives collide around a humble restaurant, as the book interrogates the myths of the American Dream, the violence of urban policy, and the “collective amnesia” that lets whole neighborhoods be burned, displaced, and rebuilt with their stories erased. Savitch-Lew’s prose is clear-eyed and compassionate, her characters flawed but unforgettable, and the political insights are woven in so organically that you feel them as lived experience rather than lecture; by the end, the mystery of who set the fire matters as much as the larger question the novel keeps asking: what would it take for a city—and a country—to remember everyone it has tried to leave behind?