Shanghailanders (Spiegel & Grau: 2024), the debut novel from Juli Min, starts at the end: Leo, a wealthy Shanghai businessman, sees his wife and daughters off at the airport as they travel to Boston. Everyone, it seems, is unhappy.

The novel then travels backwards through time, giving answers to questions revealed in later chapters, jumping from person to person: Leo, Eko, their daughters Yumi, Yoko and Kiko, and other peripheral members of the household, as we come to learn why Shanghailanders’ core family is just so dysfunctional.

In this interview, Juli and I talk about Shanghai, her decision to write the book in reverse chronological order, and what we gain when those from a non-white perspective write about expatriates.

Juli Min is a writer and editor based in Shanghai. She studied Russian and comparative literature at Harvard University, and she holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson. She was the founding editor of The Shanghai Literary Review and served as its fiction editor from 2016 to 2023.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Shanghailanders. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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