The Wangs vs The World

A “firecracker of a debut” that “knowingly and refreshingly breaks every unwritten rule of the Asian-American family saga” (Newsday), this is one of the year’s most hotly anticipated debuts. Readers will fall in love with the Wangs, a wealthy but fractured Chinese immigrant family that had—and lost—it all.

Charles Wang is mad at America. A brash, big-hearted immigrant businessman who built a cosmetics empire and made a fortune, he’s just been ruined by the financial crisis. Charles pulls his kids out of schools he can no longer afford and, together with their stepmother, Barbra, the family embarks on a cross-country road trip (Vanity Fair compares it to “a fresh Little Miss Sunshine”). The family travels from their foreclosed Bel-Air home to the upstate New York hideout of the eldest daughter, a disgraced art world It Girl. But with his son waylaid by a temptress in New Orleans, his wife ready to defect for a set of 1,000-thread-count sheets and the rest of them involved in an epic smash-up in North Carolina, Charles may have to choose between keeping his family intact and finally fulfilling his dream of starting anew in China to reclaim his family’s ancestral lands—and his pride.

Publisher: Penguin Books

Paperback

2016

ISBN: 9780241975305