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.