Juli Min’s debut, Shanghailanders, is an ambitious family drama told entirely in reverse. The novel begins in 2040 with Leo Yang, an aging Chinese real-estate investor who finds himself drifting apart from his elegant Japanese French wife Eko, their precocious eldest daughters Yumi and Yoko, and the baby of the family, aspiring actress Kiko. To understand how this happened, Min offers readers the gift of hindsight. She follows the family back in time to 2014, dissecting pivotal moments in their lives to show their impact on the family dynamic. What soon becomes clear, thanks to the book’s immersive structure, is that the Yangs have spent much of the last three decades falling apart only to put themselves back together again.
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