In this stylized and complex debut novel, two children, born near the end of the gold rush, wander through the harsh Western landscapes searching for a place to bury their father, a failed prospector . . . The story is narrated by the soft, scholastic twelve-year-old Lucy, as she journeys with her younger sibling, Sam, who struts in imitation of their father, and of the cowboys of their time. While the book presents a counter-narrative to conventional tales of America's origins, it also interrogates the more intimate dimensions of belonging and memory - New Yorker
The prose is one of How Much of These Hills Is Gold's most striking achievements. Zhang has described it as combining 'the rangy cowboy poetry of pulp Westerns' and 'the pidgin Mandarin of my childhood' - and it isn't quite like anything you've read before . . . both discordant and compelling - London Review of Books
Lyrical and mythic, How Much of These Hills is Gold reconceives the immigrant narrative to tell an original story of racism and American greed - AV Club
[An] imaginative, vital debut novel . . . Zhang's searing words pierce the heart of America's founding mythology, laying bare its lies and offering up a new, much-needed vision of this country and its people - Refinery29
Bleak and brilliant . . . Like so much of the greatest US fiction, this is a story of the American Dream, that ever-shifting thing, which has driven the nation since it was first formed. But there is a difference here. Zhang's novel, both epic and intimate, is one of immigration and outsiderdom; of what it feels like to be rejected by the country you have been told is yours . . . tenderness shines through this novel, ensuring that, for all its horrors and hard-won truths, Zhang's haunting, melancholy story still feels lit by hope. Beautifully written, perfectly conceived and devastating - for days after reading the final page, all I could do was sit and think about it - Sarah Hughes, The i
A fierce feminist Western - Sunday Express (Best novels of the year)
In this haunting adventure story set during the Gold Rush, two newly orphaned Chinese American immigrants are on the run in a ravaged landscape. Lucy and Sam carry the body of their newly deceased father as they roam, in pursuit of a place to give him a proper burial. Fusing Chinese symbolism and re-imagined history, this debut explores the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong, memories that bind and divide families, the illusion of the American Dream and the search for a home and fortune - Cosmopolitan
This is a beautiful and captivating story of grief, belonging and adventure. Set in the afterglow of the great American gold rush, it follows the lives and brutal journey of two immigrant orphaned teenage girls after the unexpected death of their father in a coal-mining town where they are unwanted. Visceral and deeply thought-provoking, it re-examines the American Dream in a compelling and unique way - Independent
