Books by Peter Ho Davies

Ah Ling: son of a prostitute and a white 'ghost', dispatched from Hong Kong as a boy to make his way alone in 1860s California. Anna Mae Wong: the first Chinese film star in Hollywood, forbidden to kiss a white man on screen. Vincent Chin: killed by a pair of Detroit auto workers in 1982 simply for looking Japanese.John Ling Smith: a half-Chinese writer visiting China for the first time, to adopt a baby girl.Inspired by three figures who lived at pivotal moments in Chinese-American history, and drawing on his own mixed-race experience, Peter Ho Davies plunges us into what it is like to feel, and be treated, like a foreigner in the country you call home.Ranging from the mouth of the Pearl River to the land of golden opportunity, this remarkable novel spans 150 years to tell a tale of familial bonds denied and fragmented, of tenacity and pride, of prejudice and the universal need to belong.

In the wake of D-Day, the war brings two very different Germans to Wales. Captain Rotheram, a German Jewish refugee working for British Intelligence, arrives in the Black Mountains to interview a notorious captive Rudolf Hess. Further north, Karsten Simmering, a dutiful soldier struggling to reconcile his surrender with his sense of honour, is incarcerated in a new POW camp on the outskirts of a remote Snowdonian village. There he encounters Esther Williams, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a fiercely nationalist sheep-farmer, who dreams of a life beyond the narrow confines of her valley. As their lives intersect, all three will come to question where they belong and where their loyalties lie.Peter Ho Davies s thought-provoking and profoundly moving first novel traces a perilous wartime romance as it explores the bonds of love and duty that hold us to family, country, and ultimately our fellow man. Vividly rooted in history and landscape, The Welsh Girl reminds us anew of the pervasive presence of the past, and the startling intimacy of the foreign.