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A Novel
by Hansen Shi
A fresh and vivid new voice brings a contemporary edge to the classic espionage novel.
At twenty-six, Princeton grad Michael Wang is trapped. Stifled under the bamboo ceiling at General Motors, he's working quietly on a breakthrough in self-driving car technology that he hopes will catapult him out of obscurity. Disaffected and largely friendless in San Francisco, he's dogged by resentment towards the Ivy Leaguers who never accepted him and his colleagues at GM who see him as passive and faceless.
But all that changes when one night, on a freelance coding platform, he meets the beautiful and enigmatic Vivian. She's been admiring Michael's work from afar and represents a rival Beijing tech company that's eager to poach him as a newly minted executive, liberate his ideas from the stagnant confines of GM, and help him find success in the wilder, less regulated business environs of China.
For Michael—alienated and underappreciated—it's no choice at all. But as soon as Michael arrives in Beijing, Vivian vanishes. When the true nature of his new position is made clear, Michael finds himself enmeshed in a dangerous web of industrial espionage and counterintelligence. Caught between two countries that view him as a pawn, where do his loyalties lie?
Piercingly intelligent and ruthlessly contemporary, The Expat is both a white-knuckle spy novel and a thrilling exploration of the myth of meritocracy, high-tech immigration, U.S.-China conflicts, identity, and disaffection that asks: in the pursuit of self-actualization, who will we betray and how far will we go?
"Despite the intriguing setup, an absence of tension and a bland protagonist keep the narrative from taking flight. This misses the mark." —Publishers Weekly
"Relentlessly intelligent and global in scope, The Expat has the electric hum of a long spring stretched tight. The concerns—authentic existence in a hyperreal economy and physical survival—put Hansen Shi in the company of Tom McCarthy and Nick Harkaway. Thrillingly ambitious!" —Will Chancellor, author of A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall
"Hansen Shi's debut uses a taut, piercingly of-the-moment spy story as a staging area for a beautifully layered, bitingly funny exploration of identity, the legacies of trauma and alienation, and the way that nations and the clashes between them can consume and co-opt every corner of a life. The Expat is pure espionage pleasure but also an enthralling dispatch from a world scarred by seething, barely submerged conflicts, both ideological and personal. A triumphant first novel." —Paul Yoon, author of Run Me To Earth and The Hive and the Honey
This information about The Expat 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.
Hansen Shi is a writer and technology investor. He studied literature at Harvard College where he was on the Fiction Board of the Harvard Advocate. He currently works as a venture capitalist in New York City.
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