When his mother dies of brain cancer, Jonah — a young Hmong-American raised in Philadelphia — inherits only silence: the silence of a father who vanished, a culture carried in half-remembered fragments, and a history that stopped being spoken aloud before he was old enough to ask questions. He goes looking. Into Thailand. Into Laos. Into a landscape that is at once foreign and the closest thing to origin he has ever known. The Weight of Lightning is a novel about grief and inheritance, about the Hmong diaspora and the generation that must search for what their parents survived.