Real Americans, a novel
Rachel Khong
Vintage: 2025
Paperback: New
9780593685143
DESCRIPTION
Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao's Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance--a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made? And if we are made, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?
REVIEWS
"Remarkable... Folded into [Real Americans] are doomed love stories, fancy parties, a subplot about epigenetics, Chinese people who look white and yummy treats... The book also poses a dizzying array of questions: What does it mean to be American, and who gets to say who is one?" -- Robert Ito, The New York Times
"A...masterful, shape-shifting novel about multiracial identity....What makes Americans 'real'? Is it our competitive drive? Our craving for wealth and status? Our insatiable quest for scientific advancement? Or is it--inevitably--the color of our skin and eyes?... [Rachel] Khong manages these twisting threads with masterful deftness.... [An] irresistible puzzle of a novel."-- Aimee Liu, Los Angeles Times
Real Americans is both a novel of ideas and of beautiful sentences. Khong's prose is a pleasure to read... even as the questions she raises are chilling, indeed."-- May-lee Chai, Minneapolis Star Tribune
AUTHOR
RACHEL KHONG is the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction, and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR; O, The Oprah Magazine; Vogue; and Esquire. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Cut, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and Tin House. In 2018, she founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco's Mission District. She lives in California.