Family Chao

LAN SAMANTHA CHANG is the author of the award-winning Hunger and Inheritance, and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. Her work has been translated into nine languages and has been chosen twice for The Best American Short Stories. A recent Berlin Prize winner, she has received creative writing fellowships from Stanford University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Samantha lives in Iowa City, where she is the director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Chang's prose moves with the unfussy ease of a shark through water - for the longest time you are just enjoying your swim, soaking up the story. Only midway through the book does it occur to you that a master hunter is at work: a writer cutting through the darker depths of what it means to be treated as an outsider in America