Born in Beijing but mostly an artifact of the United States, C Pam Zhang has lived in thirteen cities and is still looking for home. She's been awarded fellowships and scholarships from organisations including Bread Loaf, Tin House and Aspen Words. Her work appears in Kenyon Review, McSweeney's Quarterly, Tin House and elsewhere. She currently lives in San Francisco.
2020 Booker Prize (longlist) : How Much of These Hills is Gold
C Pam Zhang recommends
Memory Piece (2024) Lisa Ko "A group portrait of three women who wrest meaning from a world that is closing down around them, Memory Piece is bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love. To spend time with these characters is a gift."
Headshot (2024) Rita Bullwinkel "Headshot is an extraordinary act of literary telepathy. With prose as muscular and gleaming as a body in motion, Bullwinkel drops readers into that roaring, incandescent universe that is young womanhood. This is a book with its own pulse."
Prophet (2023) Sin Blaché and Helen Macdonald "Prophet is a crackling, shape-shifting romp with big ideas and a bigger heart. Blache and Macdonald take a no-holds-barred approach to manifesting the ways in which individual desires are exploited by the systems we live under, and ask the necessary question of whether escape from that cycle is possible. This is a display of sheer inventiveness, and a delight."
The Sleep Watcher (2023) Rowan Hisayo Buchanan "he Sleep Watcher is a taut and vicious thrum of a novel, deceptively pretty and mesmerising as the calm before a storm. Rowan Hisayo Buchanan cuts close to the bone with her insights on family and secrecy, trust and power, and the dangerous, double-edged keenness of intimacy."
Welcome Me to the Kingdom (2023) Mai Nardone "Welcome Me to the Kingdom transports readers to a Thailand that is gritty and lush, spangled and crumbling, aching with grit and ecstasy. Luck and want drive intertwined characters across a landscape that pulsates with life lived under unforgiving sun, and Mai Nardone is a writer with an atlas straight to the heart. I did not want to put this book down and neither will you."
The Women Could Fly (2022) Megan Giddings "The Women Could Fly lifts the veil of this world to show, amid the old grief and injustice, a glimmer of necessary magic. This is a gem of a book about womanhood, lineage, and defiance."
All This Could Be Different (2022) Sarah Thankam Mathews "Battle cry and love song both, All This Could Be Different is an ode - tender, sexy, and smart - to coming of age in turbulent times. As Sneha navigates the hilarious and deadly serious work of being a good friend, lover, daughter, immigrant, adult, queer woman, and worker under late stage capitalism, what emerges is a portrait of a woman determined to live her life to its brim--no matter what. Sarah Thankam Mathews writes like a blaze, and this book will remind you what it is to be young and powerfully alive."
Self-Portrait with Ghost (2022) Meng Jin "Alluring, mysterious, and crackling with sly intelligence. In stories that move from San Francisco to urban China to a city where people walk through walls, Self-Portrait with Ghost stares into the churning inner lives of women who are complex, contradictory, and always fascinating. You will be mesmerized."
Forbidden City (2022) Vanessa Hua "Gripping and vital, Forbidden City charts the sensual, intellectual, and moral awakening of a young woman who forges her own identity from beneath the shadow of Mao Zedong."
When I Sing, Mountains Dance (2022) Irene Solà "Like nothing I've read before. This novel is a feral, yowling love howl to a place of such staggering majesty that it resists usual comprehension. By giving voice to animals, storms, outcasts, one-legged girls, birthing women, and the mountain itself, Sola pushes past the limits of human experience to tell a story of instinct and earth-time that is irresistible in its jagged glory."
Matrix (2021) Lauren Groff "Matrix is alive with lust and glory. In the incandescent Marie de France – visionary, cantankerous and uncowed by the constraints of her sex – Groff paints a portrait of sisterhood that shines out of the past and into the lives of women today."
The Archer (2021) Shruti Swamy "This novel swallowed me whole. The Archer is the kind of book you always hope for: lush and sensual, tasted and felt, with striking images that play out like film behind the eyes. Swamy evokes an India that resists flat stereotype and teems with exuberance, beauty, and life. The Archer is timeless yet utterly modern as it asks what it means for a woman to make a life of art."
Luster (2020) Raven Leilani "An utterly strange and beautiful book that is both very visceral and very intellectual, about a young black woman trying to find her artistic identity."
