About Shanghailanders

A dazzling and ambitious debut novel that follows a cosmopolitan Shanghai household backward in time--beginning in 2040 and moving through our present and the recent past--exploring their secrets, their losses, and the ways a family makes and remakes itself across the years.

2040: Wealthy real estate investor Leo Yang--handsome, distinguished, a real Shanghai man--is on the train back to the city after seeing his family off at the airport. His sophisticated Japanese-French wife, Eko, and their two eldest children, Yumi and Yoko, are headed for Boston, though one daughter's revelation will soon reroute them to Paris. 2039: Kiko, their youngest daughter and an aspiring actress, decides to pursue fame at any cost, like her icon Marilyn Monroe. 2038: Yumi comes to Yoko in need, after a college-dorm situation at Harvard goes disastrously wrong.

As the years rewind to 2014, Shanghailanders brings readers into the shared and separate lives of the Yang family parent by parent, daughter by daughter, and through the eyes of the people in their orbit--a nanny from the provinces, a private driver with a penchant for danger, and a grandmother whose memories of the past echo the present. We glimpse a future where the city's waters rise and the specter of apocalypse is never far off. But in Juli Min's hands, we also see that whatever may change, universal constants remain: love is complex, life is not fair, and family will always be stubbornly connected by blood, secrets, and longing.

Brilliantly constructed and achingly resonant, Shanghailanders is an unforgettable exploration of marriage, relationships, and the layered experience of time.

Juli Min is the editor in chief and fiction editor of the Shanghai Literary Review. She was born in Seoul, Korea, and grew up in New Jersey. Min attended Phillips Academy Andover and Harvard University, where she studied Russian and comparative literature. She holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College.  

VANESSA CHAN is the Malaysian author of the novel The Storm We Made (Marysue Rucci Books/S&S, Jan 2024), a national bestseller, Good Morning America Book Club Pick and BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick, about the unlikeliest of spies — a discontent mother and wife in 1930s British Malaya who, in becoming a spy for the Japanese, unwittingly ushers in the most violent war her country has ever seen. This novel will be published in more than twenty languages/regions worldwide. Vanessa is also the author of the forthcoming The Ugliest Babies in the World, a story collection. Her other work has been published in Vogue, Esquire, and more. She grew up in Malaysia and is now based mostly in Brooklyn.