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Real Americans  By  cover art

Real Americans

By: Rachel Khong
Narrated by: Louisa Zhu, Eric Yang, Eunice Wong
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Publisher's summary

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?

"Mesmerizing"—Brit Bennett • "A page turner.”—Ha Jin • “Gorgeous, heartfelt, soaring, philosophical and deft"—Andrew Sean Greer • "Traverses time with verve and feeling."—Raven Leilani

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?

©2024 Rachel Khong (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

*A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2024, at publications including: The New York Times, Oprah Daily, Today, TIME, Kirkus, Goodreads, Vogue, LitHub, New York Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Vulture, BookPage, San Francisco Chronicle, The Story Exchange, Bustle, Town & Country, and The Rumpus.*

"If you liked Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, read Real Americans by Rachel Khong...[Rachel Khong] returns, painting on a larger canvas, in this story about three generations of a Chinese American family...Different voices follow, in a multilayered look at family and identity."—The Washington Post

"[Real Americans is a] plot-rich, spiraling, multigenerational epic [that] possesses the same heartrending humanity and deceptively subtle portrayal of characters' unseen depths [as Rachel Khong's debut]—so impossible to relate, so essential to everything. As in life, the love is in the details."—Annie Bostrom, Booklist

"Imaginative...expansive...intimate... Real Americans is a profound, riveting, and loving journey of betrayal and forgiveness, of words left unsaid, that will provide rich food for thought for book clubs and independent readers alike."—Jaclyn Fulwood, Shelf Awareness

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