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

  • Environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals the profound ecological impacts of roads, which stretch over 40 million miles across the globe. While often overlooked as mere infrastructure, these roadways pose significant threats to wildlife, resulting in the deaths of a million animals daily in the U.S. alone, and disrupting natural habitats in ways we are just beginning to understand.

    Read More about "Crossing: How Road Ecology is shaping the future of our planet"...

  • In Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explores the lives of four women navigating love, choices, and regrets during the pandemic. Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer, reflects on her past relationships while her friends face their own struggles, revealing the complexities of happiness and self-awareness in a beautifully crafted narrative.

    Read More about "Dream Count"...

  • Frank Herbert’s classic masterpiece—a triumph of the imagination and one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time.

  • In Shishmaref, Alaska, new seawalls are constructed while residents navigate the many practical and bureaucratic obstacles to moving their entire island village to higher ground. Farther south, inland hunters and fishermen set out to grow more of their own food–and to support the reintroduction of wood bison, an ancient species well suited to expected habitat changes. First Nations people in Canada team with conservationists to protect land for both local use and environmental resilience. In Early Warming, Alaskan Writer Laureate, Nancy Lord, takes a cutting-edge look at how communities in the North–where global warming is amplified and climate-change effects are most [...]