By the author of the Booker longlisted The Welsh Girl, a vibrant, powerful and iconoclastic novel telling the little-known story of the Chinese in America, and of America through its Chinese.

Ah Ling: son of a prostitute and a white 'ghost', dispatched from Hong Kong as a boy to make his way alone in 1860s California.

Anna Mae Wong: the first Chinese film star in Hollywood, forbidden to kiss a white man on screen.

Vincent Chin: killed by a pair of Detroit auto workers in 1982 simply for looking Japanese.

John Ling Smith: a half-Chinese writer visiting China for the first time, to adopt a baby girl.


Inspired by three figures who lived at pivotal moments in Chinese-American history, and drawing on his own mixed-race experience, Peter Ho Davies plunges us into what it is like to feel, and be treated, like a foreigner in the country you call home.

Ranging from the mouth of the Pearl River to the land of golden opportunity, this remarkable novel spans 150 years to tell a tale of familial bonds denied and fragmented, of tenacity and pride, of prejudice and the universal need to belong.

Panoramic in scope yet intimate in detail, THE FORTUNES might be the most honest, unflinching, cathartically biting novel I've read about Chinese American experience.