"There are some stories that require as much courage to write as they do art. Peter Ho Davies's achingly honest, searingly comic portrait of fatherhood is just such a story...The world needs more stories like this one, more of this kind of courage, more of this kind of love." —Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award-winning author of The Friend "There is nothing superfluous in these pages...A novel that...earns its place on the shelf alongside the frank and sometimes acerbic memoirs of Rachel Cusk and Anne Enright." —Claire Messud, Harper's A heartbreaking, soul-baring novel about the repercussions of choice that "will strike a resonant chord with parents everywhere," (starred Kirkus) from the award-winning author of The Welsh Girl and The FortunesA Lie Someone Told You About Yourself traces the complex consequences of one of the most personal yet public, intimate yet political experiences a...

Peter Ho Davies is a young writer of unusually worldly perspective. Born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents, he writes stories that not only reflect his multinational heritage, but delight in odd juxtapositions. In tales that travel from Coventry to Kuala Lumpur, from the past to the present, and from hilarity to tragedy, American bandits herd ostriches in Patagonia, British soldiers confront Zulus in Natal, and John Wayne leads the way for local revolutionaries in Southeast Asia. These are stories in which small lives are affected by consequential events. In "A Union," a prolonged strike at a Welsh slate quarry plays mystifying tricks of time on a couple expecting a baby. In "The Silver Screen," ragtag rebels join a communist revolution with all the flair of the Keystone Kops. In the heartbreaking title story, a rural community in North Wales copes with the accidental death of a child and learns the reaches of guilt. With their deep vein of humanism and pointed humor, the...

Set in the stunning landscape of North Wales just after D-Day, Peter Ho Davies's profoundly moving first novel traces the intersection of disparate lives in wartime. When a POW camp is established near her village, seventeen-year-old barmaid Esther Evans finds herself strangely drawn to the camp and its forlorn captives. She is exploring the camp boundary when the astonishing occurs: Karsten, a young German corporal, calls out to her from behind the fence. From that moment on, the two foster a secret relationship that will ultimately put them both at risk. Meanwhile, another foreigner, the German-Jewish interrogator Rotherham, travels to Wales to investigate Britain's most notorious Nazi prisoner, Rudolf Hess. In this richly drawn and thought-provoking work, all will come to question where they belong and where their loyalties lie.

Peter Ho Davies's award-winning debut collection, THE UGLIEST HOUSE IN THE WORLD, drew comparisons to the work of Raymond Carver, James Joyce, and V. S. Naipaul. The Washington Post hailed it as "astounding . . . Davies has left a unique, definitive footprint in the soil of contemporary short fiction." In his new collection, Davies's unforgettable characters — a Chinese son gambling with professional mourners, a mixed-race couple who experience a close encounter — strive for a love that transcends time, race, and sexuality. These are the stories of a sandwich generation — children of one century, adults of the next — caught between debts to their parents and what they owe their own offspring. Shot through with humor and grace, EQUAL LOVE confirms Davies's reputation as one of his generation's foremost writers.

From the best-selling, acclaimed author of The Welsh Girl comes a groundbreaking, provocative new novel recasting American history through the lives of Chinese Americans. Sly, funny, intelligent, and artfully structured, Tell It Slant reimagines the traditional multigenerational novel through the lens of immigrant experience. The family institution is revered in Chinese culture, but the historical reality of Chinese Americans has seen family bonds denied, fragmented, or imperiled. Tell It Slant uses this history—from the bachelor society of the gold rush era to laws against interracial marriage to the recent wave of adopted baby girls—to create a portrait of a community whose line of descent is broken, yet which has tenaciously persisted, as much through love as by blood. Through four lives—a railroad baron's valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor, Hollywood's first Chinese movie star, a victim of a...