Rachel Khong

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • READ WITH JENNA’S MAY BOOK CLUB PICK • From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures? "Mesmerizing"—Brit Bennett • "A page turner.”—Ha Jin • “Gorgeous, heartfelt, soaring, philosophical and deft"—Andrew Sean Greer • "Traverses time with verve and feeling."—Raven Leilani Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love. In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers. In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home. Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made? And if we are made, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?

A novel

Real Americans

Lindsay

“Time— it’s the one thing they can’t buy. I’ve wondered if that’s why owning art appeals,” Stan mused. “They buy my paintings because they want to own time itself. A painting is the next best thing.”

Could a life be meaningful if its foundation was something besides work?

I was afraid to form a self around a person who might disappear from my life as easily as he’d entered it.

box of live lobsters, who scratched at the cardboard from inside with rubber- banded claws. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to die. They didn’t want to be in a box. They had no idea that death was even on the table.

Let her have a moment. Have a moment, as though time weren’t all of ours, as though a moment could belong to one person. Even now, this belonged to her.

Why was it that friendship invited comparison?

“The colonizers had to insist so vehemently on their right to the land because the right itself was so shaky. The shakier the claim, the more aggressively they asserted it.”

This was what love had always been for me: denying your own reality in order to protect another person.

Somehow I was self- absorbed without even knowing who I was, or who I should be— an exasperating combination.

The other kids, kids who’d gone to private school, seemed to already know what was being taught. I thought the point of classes was to learn, but for some of my classmates, it seemed the classroom was a place to show off what they already knew.

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