Shanghailanders is the captivating read of the lives of the Yang family. The story begins in 2040, with the three daughters Yumi, Yoko and Kiko as young adults and takes the reader backwards in time revealing the events that shaped them. These events are told through multiple perspectives, including those of the family's driver and nanny.
A real unique family saga and a strong debut.

A family saga about a family of 5. Mother Japanese and the father Chinese, they met in Paris and fell in love. The book starts in the year 2040 with their three daughters beeing already teens and young adults and goes on backwards. As the story unfolds, we get to know why the present is the way it is. Though the story feels a bit shallow at some parts as if the family is more American than Asian, due to the way the characters are written. Still it's very gripping and interesting. The story well written and structured and the pace of the story is very easy to follow, which is nice since you are going back in time. All in all this debute novel is a great start for an author who surely has a lot of potential and will give us more books in the future,  hopefully.

The story of a family, two parents (the father Chinese, the mother - Japanese), and their three daughters. The history of this family is told in reverse, from the 2040s, when the girls are in their early twenties and late teens, backwards, to the time their parents met in Paris and married. The structure of storytelling here gives us an interesting perspective on how events in "the present" (2040s, by the book's reckoning) find their root causes in earlier years.

I mostly liked the writing and the structure, which is not a small feat. The book was well paced and tough to put down, despite the fact that nothing much was happening. The structure of the book feels like the main driver of this - it makes the reader want to find out why certain things happen the way they do. I also liked the psychological profiling of the main characters, making each family member (and some of the people they are close to) memorable and vivid, cause the reader to genuinely care and be interested in what happens to them (or, more importantly, why what happens to them does). The main theme of this book is the disintegration of a family over the years.

That being said, this is a flawed book, in my view. I could not shake the feeling that it was written by an American, writing, essentially, about the proclivities of an average (disturbed) American family. The setting (Shanghai), the nationalities of the protagonists, and the cultural context were shallow and almost caricature-like in nature. Having been to all the major countries in question many times, and met many families and people living there, I felt that the book was not telling me these stories. There is a pervasive American bias in characterising the protagonists, describing their emotional state, and talking through their relationships. The East Asian setting feels like it's for show only - just a badly made set of stage props designed by someone who read about what these things should be and feel like vs what they really are like. That was deeply disappointing.

There are many other books that are written about similar topics with more nuance and sensitivity, and without the American overtone. I struggle to really recommend it to anyone. Maybe a Western audience who wants to read about American family dysfunction dressed up in East Asian garb. The writing was excellent, though, which makes me feel that the author has a lot more up her sleeve. Hopefully future works will be less pretentious. Setting the book in Boston, and looking at a French-American family would have come across way better (and changed none of the substance of the story).

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.

The debuts just keep knocking it out of the park, another fantastic read from an author to keep a close on, looking over the past and detailing the present but set in a future Shanghai, a deep look at what it is to be family and how the idea of family changes and transforms with time.

This novel is in effectively the form of a series of very connected short stories or at least vignettes which tell the lives of a cosmopolitan (Chinese real-estate investing end-time prepping father Leo, Japanese-French wife Eko – who has a social media famous nature-embroider, three daughters – two Yumi and Yoko at college/university in the US- one particularly strong at maths, the youngest “baby” Kiko still notionally at home) super-rich family, across their home town of Shanghai as well as the US and Paris (where their maternal grandmother lives). Each chapter is largely a point of view one – and as well as the different family members we also understand their story from the viewpoint of their long time family driver and the children’s old nanny.

Two deliberate choices distinguish the novel: the first is that it starts in 2040, the second that the chapters are in reverse chronological order, ending in 2014.

And in both cases the author seems to make another deliberate sub-choice, which is to play very little with the possibilities (and so risk the pitfalls) of the meta-choice.

In what I think is a crucial quote, Leo who is obsessed with maths and physics (particularly “The Brief History of Time”) and its wider implications and we are told: "He had become convinced: the rise of intuitionism, the nondeterministic nature of the universe, our inability to conceptualize infinitude, the inevitable collapse of relativism . . . the past could no more predict the future than the future could foretell the past."

And to me that quote simultaneously justifies telling a family story backwards (the future of the family can shed light on the past just as in traditional stories the character’s past leads us in to understanding their future) while also implying that neither truly works – and while we do gain some deeper understanding of the characters as we learn about them there is nowhere near the depth of revelation to justify the obvious downsides: the three girls in particular have seemingly intriguing early stories; the academic swot Yoko accidentally pregnant, the cruel to her sisters Yumi hiding a kleptomania tendency and Kiko (far from the baby her family think) a secret sex-work sideline – but as the next stories move back towards their childhoods their fate is left hanging.

And, similarly perhaps, the quote could also be taken as warning against the dangers of any near-future novel, that likely any predictions will completely overestimate some changes (I am still waiting for the personal flying devices I was promised from 1960-1970 sci-fi) and completely miss others. But its like the author has taken the warning too far – and decided to effectively write a future that has little to no discernible change from our world. Apart from some very quick magnetic trains introduced in the first sentence it seems like climate change has had little world impact (other than things being a little warmer) and is very little change on people’s behaviour; US-Sino relationships have not moved at all (and again seem of little consequence to a family which splits its time between the two). Now one reason that there seems limited impact may be that as a super-rich family they are immune from or above socio-economic and political restrictions – but the choice of such a family is another choice and one which for me makes the novel lack resonance. And in any event, it seems like social media and communication is almost entirely stuck in 2024 mode some fifteen years later and generative AI has been completely forgotten as a concept.

And all of this is something of a shame as its clear that the author can write a lot. While I am not sure its easy to engender much empathy for such a materially privileged but spiritually/emotionally impoverished family – she has a very good try and the chapters on the driver and nanny (plus some side stories in the opening chapter of some people that Leo briefly encounters on a train ride) show the author’s undoubted writing skills which I am sure will flourish in her next novel once not encumbered, as they were here, by the odd execution of some structural choices.

A really interesting book with the story and viewpoints of different characters who all have a link to one another. The story stopped very abruptly which I found a little odd, but on the whole, this was an enjoyable read. I would read foster books written by this author.

I love this book. I'm always a sucker for a family saga, but to have it follow just one generation and in reverse was brilliant. Event's linked together but backwards so I found myself really paying attention to small details in case they became important later. Yet it was not burdensome at all. The side characters that loaned an outsiders perspective on the family while also adding their personal views on Shanghai were a stroke of genius. This book is just wonderful!

This book is due to be published on 9th May. Many thanks to the publisher, Dialogue Books, and to Netgalley, for a free review copy, in exchange for my honest unedited feedback.

I thoroughly enjoyed this quirky debut; it is pacey, and it is clever. The story centers around a family with three daughters, whose mother is Japanese, but grew up in France. It starts in the future (2040) and works backwards. The chapters are written from multiple perspectives by those in the family or those connected to the family, including a driver and a nanny.

The Shanghai backdrop is great, giving a feel for contemporary and future life in this high-rise city, with an undercurrent of pending apocalyptic doom. The backward trajectory can get a little complex, I found myself re-reading the early chapters at the end, and this gave them a greater depth. The family can seem a little entitled and crazy, but they are good people and committed to each other. The driver partakes in illicit corporate sponsored car races across the city and reads manga to learn some Japanese. The nanny chapter was really powerful as she outlines the love she experiences towards those in her charge, despite the transitory presence of her role in their lives. Lastly, I loved Leo’s (the father) retrospective on the true value of his work as a structural engineer “buildings were like the clothes people wore and the things they bought, necessary but often too wasteful, weighing down the planet in a thick, toxic shield of concrete”.

A wonderful debut. I do wish the author great success with this book.

Such a beautiful and poignant novel! The narrative was unique, I don't often see a book going backwards when recounting a story instead of towards the future and that was the main thing that made me liked this book. the characters were well-written and it was so interesting to see a character regression instead of progression. I just wished it had leaned a little more into the futuristic aspect and the Shanghai setting, especially at the start. 4.5 stars

This debut is absolutely stunning, a journey, an exploration of relationships through time

The book begins in the near future, 2040 and travels back with the Yang family to 2014, detailing the drama's loves and losses of Leo, his wife Eko and their children, Yumi, Yoko and Kiko. The multiple POV's add an interesting dimension to the story, enriching it still further

The family are close knot and their mother a strong, stabilising factor, but who also endures her own fears and dramas

The primary message is that "Constants remain: love is complex, life is not fair, and family will always be stubbornly connected by blood, secrets, and longing"

Shanghailanders s a stunning technical accomplishment in respect of the layering of era's and a literary accomplishment in the insightful nature of the narrative The reader is not a passive observer, but drawn into the story and intrinsically invested before they know it

The fluidity of family connections is well described and the character building is fantastic. Juil Min has an elegantly lyrical writing style that is both graceful and stong, but will stab you straight through the heart when you are not looking

Truly phenomenal and will no doubt not the last we hear of this excellent author

Thank you to Netgalley, Dialogue Books and Juli Min for this wonderful ARC. My review is left voluntarily and all opinions are my own

Min has an impressive ability to get inside stories and to make them feel rounded and significant. But the downside of that is that this book feels more like a collection of interlinked tales rather than an organic novel. The backwards telling as we move from 2040 to 2014 adds to this fracturing as story elements don't conclude or lead anywhere and while it's fascinating to trace what we didn't know in the first sections set in the future until we come to the later stories set in the past, there's also something a bit unsatisfactory about being left hanging like that.

I was somewhat disappointed that there's little sense of Shanghai or China, and not much is different in 2040 from now - there are super high-speed trains, and the climate is a bit hotter in one section but nothing seems to have materially changed.

At the heart of the stories, though, is the family: Leo and Eko and their three daughters. Moving between Shanghai, Japan and Paris; across generations; and viewing the family from both the interior and exterior, this deals with scenarios and moments that feel very human and which are treated with a kind of expansive and non-judgemental empathy.

And that's where I think Min's skills sit: take away the slightly gimmicky backwards telling and this is an intimate look at family relationships, what is said and unsaid, and how people grow into, and out of, their family roles.