In her new novel, "Everything I Never Told You," novelist Celeste Ng quickly plunges readers into the depths of a family tragedy.Late one night, after the Lee family spends a seemingly normal evening filled with the tiny joys of parents and children, 16-year-old Lydia in a pond near the family home. No one in her family, the author tells her readers, will remember their fleeting moments of happiness."Instead they will dissect this last evening for years to come," Ng writes. "What did they miss that they should have seen? What small gesture forgotten might have changed everything? They will pick it down to the bones wondering how this had all gone so wrong, and they will never be sure."In "Everything I Never Told You" Ng explores misery of losing a child, while also using uses the story to examine the challenges of a mixed family in the Midwest during the 1970s, a time when interracial marriages and their offspring made attracted unwelcome and sometimes hostile attention. She will read from the novel at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Magers and Quinn Bookstore in Minneapolis.Ng said the book grew out of a story her husband told her about a little girl he knew who nearly drowned when she fell in a lake. The story touched Ng because of her own fears of the water, and she began writing about the implications for the family. As she wrote, the story developed and became about a lot more.In writing the novel, Ng, 33, began drawing on her own background as an Asian-American who grew up in Pittsburgh and in the Shaker Heights, Ohio, area near Cleveland. But she decided to set the story in the 1970s. "That seemed like a very poignant era to me," Ng said. "For her to see her daughter have a lot of opportunities that for her had maybe now passed."