Best-selling East Bay author Vanessa Hua started writing her new novel “Coyoteland” in the spring of 2021, a year into the pandemic, when she was frequently outdoors in her neighborhood.
“One morning I was out on a walk, and I heard this scuffling, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was a coyote being chased by two deer. They ran right by me,” says Hua. A larger coyote had been attacking people in the area for months, an issue that clearly affected Hua’s plotting.
“It got me really thinking about territory, about the interface between wildlife and suburbia. But also territory fought over by neighbors,” says Hua, who appears in conversation with Oscar Villalon at The Booksmith in San Francisco on May 12 to promote “Coyoteland” (Flatiron Books, 336 pages, May 12, 2026).
“In this time of upheaval and reckoning, how do we be good neighbors to each other? Whether it’s with other animals or with each other?” Hua, author of 2018’s “A River of Stars” and 2022’s “Forbidden City,” wondered.
“Coyoteland” is set in El Nido, a toney fictional town in the hills east of Berkeley. When Jin Chang moves his wife and daughters into the privileged neighborhood hoping to succeed in one last scheme, they set off a scandal. His next-door neighbor Blair Belle, who seems progressive, is embroiled in a scheme of her own. The adults and children combat suburban tragedies, and each other.
Hua wasn’t inspired by a particular person in writing the book, but rather by figuring out how characters get themselves into a situation, and out of it. She says, “Sometimes I have characters who are making questionable choices, and as a writer, I’m trying to understand why.” She asks herself, “How can we understand their good intentions, what they meant to do? What sort of dream were they reaching for, even if it falls apart on the way there?”
Considering the four families in “Coyoteland,” Hua asked, “What is it that they want? What stands in their way, and how can they be allies to each other?”
Recognizing today’s highly divisive times, Hua hopes that the book “offers thoughts about the ways in which we can work together.”
The isolation of the pandemic spurred her to investigate what she calls “the loneliness epidemic.” She says, “There’s so many overlapping crises, whether it’s about climate or public health or politics, and that divides us.”
The pandemic also gave her the opportunity to explore the value of getting outside. “I was so grateful during the pandemic that the outdoors were steps away, which figures into the plot of this novel but also figured into the life of my family,” says Hua, who walked or hiked two or three times a day with her two boys, who were third graders when the pandemic began.
The novel also explores diversity in suburbia, which Hua feels gets overlooked. She says, “I wanted to depict a suburb that was as diverse as it is in reality—there are people from different backgrounds, that vary by class and race.”
Noting that most Americans live in suburbs, and that 45 percent are people of color, Hua says that reality is not reflected in pop culture: “With this novel and the ideas of suburbia, I wanted to explode that Black/white racial binary, explode that myth of the good immigrant or the model minority, all these suppositions that people have about a place.”
While Hua’s novels have been lauded —“Forbidden City” was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and “A River of Stars” was named to the Washington Post and NPR’s Best Books of 2018 lists —her debut book of narrative nonfiction, “Uprooted,” “about foraging and the natural world, and caregiving and midlife,” is due in spring 2027.
Plus, she has an idea for her next novel.
“I hope my books offer people an invitation into this exciting world that maybe they hadn’t considered. And that it can help spark discussion, maybe even help someone,” says Hua, who continues: “You know, I’ve had readers say, ‘This book reached me at exactly the right moment I needed it.’ That is amazing when you hear that.”
Vanessa Hua appears at 7 p.m. May 12 at The Booksmith, 1727 Haight St., San Francisco and at 2 p.m. May 16 at Orinda Books, 276 Village Square, Orinda.