Description

In the tradition of Amy Tan and Jhumpa Lahiri, a moving portrait of several generations of family residing in Vancouver's Chinatown From Knopf Canada's New Face of Fiction program--starting reasons for Yann Martel's Life of Pi and ann marie MacDonald's Fall in Your Knees--comes this strongly evocative novel. At age eighteen, Seid Quan may be the first within the Chan family to emigrate from China to Vancover in 1913. Making the way in which for a wife and son, he's greatly unhappy, even as he ties the Chinatown community. Weaving in and from the past and the current, The Finish of East items together the hypnotic story of Seid Quan's family: his wife Shew Lin, whose wish for her family are endangered by her own misguided steps; his son Pon Guy, who challenges with responsibility and wish; his daughter-in-law Siu Performed, who attempts to function as the caregiver everybody needs, even as she thinks herself unraveling; and his granddaughter Sammy, who finds herself involved in a volatile combination of attraction, suffering, and duty. A beautiful introduction of seclusion, immigration, love, and madness, The Finish of East sets household issues from the background of Vancouver's Chinatown--a city inside a city where dreams are broken as rapidly because they're constructed, and where history repeats itself through the decades. It's a daring and accomplished debut in one of Canada's best new literary superstars.