How Much Of These Hills Is Gold (‘a Tale Of Two Sisters During The Gold Rush … Beautifully Written’ The I, Best Books Of The Year)

By (author) Zhang, C Pam
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''A wonder . . . gorgeous, soulful, feral'' GARTH GREENWELL

''Ferocious, dark and gleaming'' LAUREN GROFF

An untold story of the arrival of Chinese-American immigrants to the US during the Gold Rush. A novel about conflict between two siblings, carrying the body of their newly deceased father across a harsh landscape.

Description

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020

A BARACK OBAMA BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020

America. In the twilight of the Gold Rush, two siblings cross a landscape with a gun in their hands and the body of their father on their backs . . .

Ba dies in the night, Ma is already gone. Lucy and Sam, twelve and eleven, are suddenly alone and on the run. With their father''s body on their backs, they roam an unforgiving landscape dotted with giant buffalo bones and tiger paw prints, searching for a place to give him a proper burial.

How Much of These Hills is Gold is a sweeping adventure tale, an unforgettable sibling story and a remarkable novel about a family bound and divided by its memories.

''A daring and haunting epic'' SUNDAY TIMES

''A unique reimagining of the American West adventure'' THE TIMES

''A fierce, feminist Western'' DAILY MAIL

''Remarkable'' HARPER''S BAZAAR

''Reminiscent of both Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison'' IRISH TIMES

''C Pam Zhang''s arresting, beautiful first novel is filled with myths of her own making as well as sorrows and joys'' NEW YORK TIMES

A GWYNETH PALTROW BOOK CLUB PICK

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The 19th-century American West is the setting for C Pam Zhang''s impressive debut. Rickety wagons, gambling dens, dusty towns and dodgy outlaws stalk its pages . . . How Much of These Hills is Gold breaks the mould [as a] revisionist immigrant fable of the making of the West . . . each new revelation becomes compulsive . . . it blossoms into a daring and haunting epic
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Sure to be the boldest debut of the year, How Much of These Hills Is Gold . . . grapples with the legend of the wild west and mines brilliant new gems from a wellworn setting . . . the story feels completely original, flushed through with new and unexpected perspectives. Through Zhang''s deep attention, the classic western is given a rich new shading as race, gender, sexual identity, poverty and pubescence come into play . . . How Much of These Hills Is Gold is an impressive debut . . . The prose carries an airless, uniquely pungent flavour. By the end, it has built into an epic, powerfully wrought journey, and it is refreshing to discover a new author of such grand scale, singular focus and blistering vision
Review quote
C Pam Zhang''s arresting, beautiful first novel is filled with myths of her own making as well as sorrows and joys
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[An] arresting debut novel . . . [it] has a mythic quality through which Zhang dissects history and belonging . . . One thought echoes through the book: "What makes a home a home?" With each act a new meaning emerges - beneath the grit is a tender and searching tale
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[A] unique, discomforting reimagining of the American West adventure . . . a story that combines brutal beauty and dreamlike horror . . . a book about loneliness, belonging and the ferocious delusion of the American dream. The story is conveyed in a spare, lyrical prose with sharp, pronounced imagery
Review quote
Chinese migration to Gold Rush California was among the themes of Peter Ho Davies''s The Fortunes a few years back. The subject