River East, River West

"Alva is one of the protagonists. She’s a moody, rebellious teenager who is starting to pull away from her mother, a white American woman. Alva has a dual identity—she has a Chinese father who she doesn’t know, and an American mother. She’s in the midst of grappling with who she is and who she wants to be. This is Shanghai in the mid 2000s, and the country is in a state of flux—starting to open up to the outside world. This sort of mirrors the state of flux that she’s going through internally. She starts at a local Chinese state school, but really wants to attend this international American school that she manages to go to in the end. But she’s an outsider at both places. So there’s a lot about identity and belonging and homeland and colonialism all tackled in a really seamless way and integrated into the narrative. Then there’s a second perspective devoted to Lu Fang, the Chinese businessman who Alva’s mother marries. Through Lu Fang, we get a sweep of Chinese history, from the Cultural Revolution onwards. So it’s a book that tackles big themes and a lot of history, but always through a propulsive narrative that keeps you turning the pages. Certainly, in our initial reading, we found a lot about migration, immigration, displacement—which is not surprising, giving that’s often in the enws at the moment. It’s something that countries and societies are grappling with on a daily basis. The environment was a theme that came up quite often as well. And, as with Restless Dolly Maunder , how the work of women has often been under-recognised and under-paid, and the constraints under which women, in particular, must operate under."