** 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
