A dazzling and ambitious debut novel that follows a cosmopolitan Shanghai household backward in time--beginning in 2040 and moving through our present and the recent past--exploring their secrets, their losses, and the ways a family makes and remakes itself across the years.

Asked to take the lead in a corruption investigation in which the principal figure and his family have already fled to the U.S., Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Bureau is charged to uncover the culprit's partners-in-crime and their organization.

They're called parachutes: teenagers dropped off to live in private homes and study in the US while their wealthy parents remain in Asia. Claire Wang never thought she'd be one of them, until her parents pluck her from her privileged life in Shanghai and enroll her at a high school in California. Suddenly she finds herself living in a stranger's house, with no one to tell her what to do for the first time in her life. She soon embraces her newfound...

Set against the backdrop of developing modern China, a new novel is a coming-of-age tale, part family and social drama, as it follows two generations searching for belonging and opportunity in a rapidly changing world. Shanghai, 2007: Fourteen-year-old Alva has always longed for more. Raised by her American expat mother, she's never known her Chinese father, and is certain a better life awaits them in America. But when her mother announces her engagement...

Violet Minturn, a half-Chinese/half-American courtesan who deals in seduction and illusion in Shanghai, struggles to find her place in the world, while her mother, Lucia, tries to make sense of the choices she has made and the men who have shaped her.

"The system has no place for a cop who puts justice above the interests of the Party. It's a miracle that I survived as long as I did." *** For years, Chen Cao managed to balance the interests of the Communist Party and the promises made by his job. He was both a Chief Inspector of Special Investigations of the Shanghai Police Department and the deputy party secretary of the bureau. He was considered a potential rising star in the Party until, after...