The Fortunes - Softcover

Davies, Peter Ho

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1328745481 ISBN 13: 9781328745484

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2017

Synopsis

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

About this title

From the Author

PETER HO DAVIES is the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of The Welsh Girl (long-listed for the Booker Prize), The Ugliest House in the World, and Equal Love. Davies was chosen by Granta as one of the Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. He teaches at the University of Michigan.

From the Back Cover

Praise for The Fortunes
 
The Fortunes is wonderfully lucid and sharply imagined. From the very first page, the people in this novel rise from history and we root for them, empathizing with them, as they make their way in the early American West and beyond. It was so easy to be lost in the story, to walk with them for a while, loving and longing and grieving with them. Readers will be richer for it.
Jesmyn Ward, author of Salvage the Bones
 
Only a writer as gifted as Peter Ho Davies could capture the full weight of a century s history with such an extraordinary lightness of touch. In his deft hands the dust falls away from a collection of hoary images the building of the transcontinental railroad, the steaming laundry in Chinatown, the Dragon Lady flickering onscreen revealing Chinese-American lives and desires in all their freshness, intensity, contradictoriness, and depth. Buoyant yet profound, unsentimental yet affecting, and above all beautifully written, The Fortunes reimagines in thrilling ways what the multigenerational immigrant novel can be. Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Ms. Hempel Chronicles
 
Panoramic in scope yet intimate in detail, The Fortunes might be the most honest, unflinching, cathartically biting novel I ve read about the Chinese-American experience. It asks the big questions about identity and history that every American needs to ask in the twenty-first century. Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You
The Fortunes is a genre bender, unique in conception and rich in resonance. It combines fiction with history and myth and depicts a different kind of America, one produced by the mingling of races and cultures. This book illuminates an obscure side of the immigrant experience. Ha Jin, author of A Map of Betrayal
 

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1328745481
• ISBN 13: 9781328745484
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288