Girl in Translation

New York Times bestseller Girl in Translation is Jean Kwok’s powerful story of a Chinese immigrant family in Brooklyn and their gifted daughter trying to life with no money and no English.

Kimberley Chang and her mother move from Hong Kong to New York. A new life awaits them – making a new home in a new country. But all they can afford is a verminous, broken-windowed Brooklyn apartment. The only heating is an unreliable oven. They are deep in debt.

And neither one speaks one word of English.

Yet there is hope. Eleven-year-old Kim goes to school. And though cut off by an alien language and culture and forced by poverty to work nights in a sweatshop – she finds the classroom challenges liberating. In books and learning she’ll be saved. But can Kim successfully turn to lost girl from Hong Kong into a happy American woman? And should she?

Jean Kwok’s powerful and moving tale of hardship and triumph, of heartbreak and love, speaks of all that gets lost in translation.

‘A sensitively handled rites-of-passage account…has the unmistakable ring of authenticity’ Metro

‘A truly amazing story that’ll leave you full of admiration and affection for the characters’ Easy Living

‘A classic and moving immigration story’ Red

Jean Kwok emigrated from Hong Kong to Brooklyn as a child; her first novel Girl in Translation is based loosely on her own experience as a Chinese immigrant in America. With Girl in Translation Jean Kwok has won the American Library Association Alex Award, an Orange New Writers title and international critical acclaim.

Jean Kwok

Jean Kwok was born in Hong Kong and emigrated to Brooklyn, New York as a child. She received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard and completed an MFA in fiction at Columbia University. After working as an English teacher and Dutch–English translator at Leiden University in the Netherlands, Jean now writes full-time. Girl in Translation is her first novel.