GHOST GIRL, BANANA

Londoner Lily Chen descends into the maze of 1990s Hong Kong to piece together her late mother’s secret past in this slow-burning mystery.

Some people learn about their family histories through photo albums and bedtime stories. Twenty-five-year-old Lily Miller, formerly Li-Li Chen, receives a letter in the mail at her London home informing her of a large inheritance from a stranger that has some connection to her late mother, Sook-Yin Chen. Still recovering from a suicide attempt she made while studying at Cambridge, Lily finds herself jolted out of her passive routine—volunteering and therapy—and takes off for the labyrinthine metropolis of Hong Kong two months before the 1997 handover from the U.K. to China. In alternating chapters we learn that, back in 1966, Sook-Yin was sent by her family from Kowloon to London to train as a nurse. The journey was less a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity than a semipermanent exile ending with her death in a suspicious “road accident.” In a series of gut-wrenching conversations, Lily discovers the price that Sook-Yin paid for surviving in her new environment: By choosing to “give up her culture” and become “a banana,” she lost the respect of her loved ones back home. Treading sure-footedly on uneven terrain, author Wharton unpacks chauvinist attitudes about race and nationality from the perspectives of both the colonized and the colonizers, painting, through bitter twists and turns, a picture of diasporic people whose origins are their most valuable MacGuffins. Two complex histories are nested within one another, a testament to the mutually inextricable struggles of a mother and daughter who, in life, pass each other like two ships in the night.

Brimming with cinematic tension, this novel offers relationships and revelations more precious than a £500,000 inheritance.