Fortunes

Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
for literature that confronts racism and examines diversity

Winner of the 2017 Chautauqua Prize

Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize

A New York Times Notable Book 
"Riveting and luminous...Like the best books, this one haunts the reader well after the end."—Jesmyn Ward

“[A] complex, beautiful novel . . . Stunning.”—NPR, Best Books of 2016

“Intense and dreamlike . . . filled with quiet resonances across time.”—The New Yorker
Sly, funny, intelligent, and artfully structured, The Fortunes recasts American history through the lives of Chinese Americans and reimagines the multigenerational novel through the fractures of immigrant family experience.

Inhabiting four lives—a railroad baron’s valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor; Hollywood’s first Chinese movie star; a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes the Asian American community; and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption—this novel captures and capsizes over a century of our history, showing that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive—as much through love as blood.

“A prophetic work, with passages of surpassing beauty.”—Joyce Carol Oates, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award citation

“A poignant, cascading four-part novel . . . Outstanding.”—David Mitchell, Guardian

“The most honest, unflinching, cathartically biting novel I’ve read about the Chinese American experience.”—Celeste Ng