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Underspin

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Ryan Lo begins playing table tennis at age eight. His brilliant but ruthless coach sees a talent in him that might be nurtured into greatness.

Through an adolescence marked by hours of practice, matches away from home, clandestine relationships and a determination to win, Ryan ascends to the highest echelons of the game, just as he was supposed to.

But here he is now, dead before his twenty-fifth birthday, leaving grief and confusion in his wake.

Ryan Lo was meant to be great. What happened?

Underspin delves beneath the pressure that forges a champion, and the vulnerability that makes a coming of age: the crackling intensity of a match, the push and pull of first love, and the great injustices committed within our closest relationships.

'‘Challengers, but make it table tennis' Lit Hub, 'Most Anticipated Books of 2025'
'An eruption of a debut . . . with meticulous precision and tremendous heart' Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars
'A superior force to be reckoned with' Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others and Choice
'A kaleidoscopic novel . . . Zhao's prose is a marvel' Rob Franklin, author of Great Black Hope

© E Y Zhao 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Critics Review

A staggeringly good debut, written with élan, compassion and wit, that takes the world of professional table-tennis and serves us a story about prestige, abuse, ambition, loyalty and the terrible results of feeling surveilled by the eye of high expectations.
author of The Ministry of Time
Zhao's Underspin is an eruption of a debut. This novel displays a wondrous ability that renders both the central sport and lives that weave around it with meticulous precision and tremendous heart. The beauty of sport the spirit of desire and the sacrifice required for greatness are all captured here in this stunner.
National Book Award and Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize-shortlisted author of Chain-Gang All-Stars
A complex and dynamic tragedy, carefully rendering the many lives that are drawn into the orbit of a rising star. Zhao, much like Underspin’s protagonist, wields great talent and skill
author of Bellies
Beautifully written, funny, and tragic, Underspin is a triumph of a novel
Chicago Review of Books
Challengers, but make it table tennis . . . I love a character portrait and I love a bildungsroman and I love a sports story that isn't really about sports.
Lit Hub
Like Challengers did to tennis last year, Underspin might do for table tennis. Zhao’s debut is wildly ambitious and searingly brilliant, jolting the reader with devastation, nostalgia, embarrassment, prestige, and sex—all in a completely unexpected field. Underspin is meaty with brain and brawn, radically alive in surprising ways. A tremendous writer of fiction is born
Soft Union
Andre Agassi's Open meets Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad in this wildly exciting, whipsmart and beautiful novel of a tragic table tennis star, told by those who were closest to him. Mobile, adventurous, and deeply imaginative, it's a stunner of a debut
Our Culture
E.Y. Zhao arrives on the literary scene like Minerva emerging from the head of Zeus: fully formed, formidable, and a superior force to be reckoned with. Who knew the world needed a table-tennis novel? Except that it is not a table tennis novel, or not just one – it is, indelibly, what the novel has always been about: the tangle of human life; error, power, damage, striving; the complicated ties that connect us in a web at once tensile, tough, and frangible.
Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Lives of Others and Choice
Underspin is a kaleidoscopic novel about many things: the dark center of hurt, its ripples, and the unpayable costs of ambition. Zhao’s prose is a marvel—sly, seductive, and cutthroat as a kill shot
author of Great Black Hope
E. Y. Zhao’s Underspin hurtles down the line and leaves a trail of fire in its wake. An electric debut
author of Four Treasures of the Sky

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