Rachel Khongová

Throughout MY DEAR YOU, normal people go through extraordinary transformations. A government injects its people with a drug that makes them see everyone else as members of their own race and gender. A factory worker develops an unlikely friendship with the artificially intelligent sex doll she is tasked with training. God decides that humanity is a lost cause and gives each person 24 hours to decide in which animal form they will spend the rest of their days. Along the way, characters are confronted with supernatural and otherworldly interventions, as well as the earthly, human concerns that shape our daily lives: capitalism and race, intimacy, memory, and mortality. Playful and tender, dark and witty, each of these stories is infused with a profound sense of compassion. They express a powerful curiosity about the human experience, and the inescapable choices that meet us all: to have or not have children; to pursue connections with others in spite of life’s impermanence; how to live – and live well.

New York City, 1999. Lily Chen is an unpaid intern, pursuing the American Dream, when she falls for a young financier – and the life of luxury his vast fortune promises. Everything she wants seems to finally be within reach. But deep down, she knows that her ambitious scientist mother, Mei, imagined so much more for her when she fled the unspoken horrors of Mao’s cultural revolution. Twenty years later, Lily is a single parent, estranged from her own family and increasingly isolated from her teenage son, Nick. Desperate to break free from their life on a remote island in Washington State, Nick strives to live better than the generation before him, unable to understand his mother’s choices. But when he looks into the past and is unexpectedly confronted by the ghosts of his grandmother’s young life in 1960s China, he risks unsettling a legacy of family secrets – passed on from mother, to daughter, to son. Following three generations of one Chinese American family, REAL AMERICANS is a mesmerising, multilayered family drama which explores the choices we make for ourselves, and for our children. Spanning decades and continents, it is a soaring, heartfelt story about fate, fortune, and what it means to belong.

Humorem protkaný příběh o lásce, ztrátě a vzpomínkách v jejich nejrůznějších podobách. Život třicetileté Ruth se neubírá zrovna šťastným směrem. Těsně před Vánoci se rozejde se svým snoubencem a k tomu ji překvapí zpráva z domova – její otec Howard Young, uznávaný profesor historie nenávratně ztrácí paměť. Ruth podá výpověď v práci, opustí velkoměsto a vrací se do domu svého dětství, aby rodičům pomohla vyrovnat se s nenadálými změnami. Je ochotná vyzkoušet cokoliv, i zaručené recepty proti demenci – medúzovou polévku či medúzové placičky. Román psaný formou deníkových zápisků je humornou i dojemnou sondou rodinných vztahů.