These stories range across a series of backgrounds- from a Chinese son gambling with professional mourners to a couple who experience a close encounter with an alien. The characters share an instantly recognisable sense of displacement - these are children of one century, adults of the next.

A collection of short stories examines the imbalance of love between parents and children and the changing roles of the generations. (view table of contents)

A New York Times Editors' Choice A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2016 “Davies writes with a rare emotional resonance and a deft sense of structure; it's hard not to be in awe of the way he's composed this complex, beautiful novel . . . Stunning.” —NPR “Davies [is] a master storyteller.” —Entertainment Weekly 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.

Product Description: From the bestselling, acclaimed author of The Welsh Girl comes a groundbreaking, provocative new novel recasting American history through the lives of Chinese Americans.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...read more

Product Description: Peter Ho Davies is a young writer of unusually worldly perspective. Born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents, he writes stories that not only reflect his multinational heritage, but delight in odd juxtapositions. In tales that travel from Coventry to Kuala Lumpur, from the past to the present, and from hilarity to tragedy, American bandits herd ostriches in Patagonia, British soldiers confront Zulus in Natal, and John Wayne leads the way for local revolutionaries in Southeast Asia...read more

At the height of World War II, an unexpected and forbidden romance blossoms between seventeen-year-old Esther Evans, the daughter of a Welsh shepherd, who works in a local pub, and Karsten Simmering, a troubled young German soldier at a nearby POW camp, who questions what he has been fighting for. A first novel by the author of Equal Love. Reprint.