Peter Ho Davies and Celeste Ng discuss THE FORTUNES

Porter Square Books welcomes bestselling authors Peter Ho Davies and Celeste Ng to discuss Davies’s new novel, The Fortunes.

Sly, funny, and artfully structured, The Fortunes recasts American history through the lives of a multigenerational Chinese American immigrant family. The novel inhabits 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 — and, capturing over a century of history, shows that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive. Building fact into fiction and spinning fiction around fact, Davies uses inspired by real life stories to examine the process of becoming not only Chinese American, but American.