The Fortunes — Peter Ho Davies

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 Asian Americans, 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.

Building fact into fiction, spinning fiction around fact, Davies uses each of these stories -- three inspired by real historical characters -- to examine the process of becoming not only Chinese American, but American.