Rachel Khong – författare

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures? 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?

Her life at a crossroads, a young woman goes home again in this funny and inescapably moving debut from a wonderfully original new literary voice.

'Incandescent and explosive and compassionate all at once' BRYAN WASHINGTON'Rachel Khong is one of our best observers of the human condition' RITA BULLWINKEL'Beautiful, effortless' AIMEE BENDERFrom the author of the New York Times bestselling REAL AMERICANS comes a playful, richly inquisitive collection exploring the connections and disruptions which define us. Throughout MY DEAR YOU, normal people go through extraordinary transformations. A government injects its people with a drug that makes them see everyone else as members of their own race and gender. A factory worker develops an unlikely friendship with the artificially intelligent sex doll she is tasked with training. God decides that humanity is a lost cause and gives each person 24 hours to decide in which animal form they will spend the rest of their days.Along the way, characters are confronted with supernatural and otherworldly interventions, as well as the earthly, human concerns that shape our daily lives: capitalism and race, intimacy, memory, and mortality.Playful and tender, dark and witty, each of these stories is infused with a profound sense of compassion. They express a powerful curiosity about the human experience, and the inescapable choices that meet us all: to have or not have children; to pursue connections with others in spite of life’s impermanence; how to live – and live well.***Praise for Rachel Khong'Mesmerizing' BRIT BENNETT'Gorgeous, heartfelt, soaring, philosophical and deft' ANDREW SEAN GREER'Traverses time with verve and feeling' RAVEN LEILANI'A page turner' HA JIN

** 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