Readers' rating:
Published Jun 2022
288 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
For fans of Hustlers and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, the story of two Asian American women who band together to grow a counterfeit handbag scheme into a global enterprise - an incisive and glittering blend of fashion, crime, and friendship from the author of Bury What We Cannot Take and Soy Sauce for Beginners.
Money can't buy happiness…but it can buy a decent fake.
Ava Wong has always played it safe. As a strait-laced, rule-abiding Chinese American lawyer with a successful surgeon as a husband, a young son, and a beautiful home—she's built the perfect life. But beneath this façade, Ava's world is crumbling: her marriage is falling apart, her expensive law degree hasn't been used in years, and her toddler's tantrums are pushing her to the breaking point.
Enter Winnie Fang, Ava's enigmatic college roommate from Mainland China, who abruptly dropped out under mysterious circumstances. Now, twenty years later, Winnie is looking to reconnect with her old friend. But the shy, awkward girl Ava once knew has been replaced with a confident woman of the world, dripping in luxury goods, including a coveted Birkin in classic orange. The secret to her success? Winnie has developed an ingenious counterfeit scheme that involves importing near-exact replicas of luxury handbags and now she needs someone with a U.S. passport to help manage her business—someone who'd never be suspected of wrongdoing, someone like Ava. But when their spectacular success is threatened and Winnie vanishes once again, Ava is left to face the consequences.
Swift, surprising, and sharply comic, Counterfeit is a stylish and feminist caper with a strong point of view and an axe to grind. Peering behind the curtain of the upscale designer storefronts and the Chinese factories where luxury goods are produced, Kirstin Chen interrogates the myth of the model minority through two unforgettable women determined to demand more from life.
"Chen spins a clever tale offering two sides of a story involving a complicated friendship and knockoff handbags...The story is further deepened by the author's sharp, convincing details of the fashion industry and its shadow market, which lends this tale of fakes the tang of authenticity. Readers will be left guessing at the truth until the last page." - Publishers Weekly
"As the story glides among San Francisco, Hong Kong, and China, Chen turns the stereotype of the docile Asian woman on its head...A delightfully different caper novel with a Gone Girl–style plot twist." - Kirkus Reviews
"Propulsive and captivating...A provocative story of fashion, friendship, and fakes (in more ways than one), with characters that both subvert and capitalize on the model-minority myth. No surprise that the sly feminist caper was the subject of a fierce eight-way bidding war for TV rights." - Vogue, The Best Books of 2022
"Counterfeit is decadent and delicious. The sparkling storyline seduces with its compelling twists and turns even as Kirstin Chen deftly interrogates issues of race, identity, wealth and consumerism. A true delight for mind and heart from beginning to end." - Jean Kwok, New York Times bestselling author of Searching for Sylvie Lee
"Sly and thoroughly compelling, Kirstin Chen's Counterfeit illuminates the world of fake designer handbags, as ruthless adventuress Winnie and her upstanding former college roommate Ava build an illicit business out of bravado and lies. Nothing is as it seems, and Chen's ingenious plot will keep you breathless to the last page." - Claire Messud,New York Times bestselling author of The Burning Girl
This information about Counterfeit was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kirstin Chen's new novel, Counterfeit was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins in June 2022. Her second novel, Bury What We Cannot Take, was named a best book of the season by Electric Literature, The Millions, The Rumpus, Harper's Bazaar, and InStyle. She is also the author of Soy Sauce for Beginners. She has received fellowships from the Steinbeck Fellows Program, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, and Djerassi, among others. Born and raised in Singapore, she lives in San Francisco.
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