Real Americans
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Summary
** THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER **
'Insightful and heartfelt' GLAMOUR
'Easy to inhale' GUARDIAN
'Mesmerizing' BRIT BENNETT, author of THE VANISHING HALF
***
New York City, 1999. Lily Chen is an unpaid intern, pursuing the American Dream, when she falls for a young financier – and the life of luxury his vast fortune promises. Everything she wants seems to finally be within reach. But deep down, she knows that her ambitious scientist mother, Mei, imagined so much more for her when she fled the unspoken horrors of Mao’s cultural revolution.
Twenty years later, Lily is a single parent, estranged from her own family and increasingly isolated from her teenage son, Nick. Desperate to break free from their life on a remote island in Washington State, Nick strives to live better than the generation before him, unable to understand his mother’s choices. But when he looks into the past and is unexpectedly confronted by the ghosts of his grandmother’s young life in 1960s China, he risks unsettling a legacy of family secrets – passed on from mother, to daughter, to son.
Following three generations of one Chinese American family, REAL AMERICANS is a mesmerising, multilayered family drama which explores the choices we make for ourselves, and for our children. Spanning decades and continents, it is a soaring, heartfelt story about fate, fortune, and what it means to belong.
***
'Traverses time with verve and feeling' RAVEN LEILANI, author of LUSTER
'An eye-opener, imaginative and exhilarating' HA JIN, author of WAITING
'Gorgeous, heartfelt, soaring, philosophical and deft' ANDREW SEAN GREER, author of LESS
'Insightful and heartfelt' GLAMOUR
'Easy to inhale' GUARDIAN
'Mesmerizing' BRIT BENNETT, author of THE VANISHING HALF
***
New York City, 1999. Lily Chen is an unpaid intern, pursuing the American Dream, when she falls for a young financier – and the life of luxury his vast fortune promises. Everything she wants seems to finally be within reach. But deep down, she knows that her ambitious scientist mother, Mei, imagined so much more for her when she fled the unspoken horrors of Mao’s cultural revolution.
Twenty years later, Lily is a single parent, estranged from her own family and increasingly isolated from her teenage son, Nick. Desperate to break free from their life on a remote island in Washington State, Nick strives to live better than the generation before him, unable to understand his mother’s choices. But when he looks into the past and is unexpectedly confronted by the ghosts of his grandmother’s young life in 1960s China, he risks unsettling a legacy of family secrets – passed on from mother, to daughter, to son.
Following three generations of one Chinese American family, REAL AMERICANS is a mesmerising, multilayered family drama which explores the choices we make for ourselves, and for our children. Spanning decades and continents, it is a soaring, heartfelt story about fate, fortune, and what it means to belong.
***
'Traverses time with verve and feeling' RAVEN LEILANI, author of LUSTER
'An eye-opener, imaginative and exhilarating' HA JIN, author of WAITING
'Gorgeous, heartfelt, soaring, philosophical and deft' ANDREW SEAN GREER, author of LESS
Reviews
Real Americans traverses time with verve and feeling. Khong captures how people can be strange to themselves, how bewilderment can be a site of creation (or change, or becoming)
Raven Leilani