The Other Valley
The Hunter

Real Americans

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?
SEE LESS

More Adult, Non-Juvenile Books

  • Ben-Hur surpassed the fabulously popular Uncle Tom in the 19th century and was beloved for its attempt to faithfully represent the life and times of Jesus, and the person of Jesus himself.

  • The American buffalo—our nation’s official mammal—is an improbable, shaggy beast that has found itself at the center of many of our most mythic and sometimes heartbreaking tales.

  • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • Twelve short stories that mark a turning point in the work of “one of the true American masters" (The New York Review of Books).

  • Prima ballerina Natalia Leonova returns to St. Petersburg after a life-altering accident, confronting the ghosts of her past and the complex relationships that shaped her career. As she grapples with the allure of the stage and the pain of her memories, she must choose between the world of Russian dance that nearly destroyed her and the possibility of redemption through love and artistry.

    Read More about "City of Night Birds"...