Ghost Girl, Banana

I was desperate to get my hands on this novel as the title (which is SO clever) and description had made me think this would be a book that would be right up my street, and I was correct. This is a stunning novel and one that had me in tears more than once. A dual timeline narrative following mother and daughter at different points in time, it manages to make both stories equally compelling AND manages that rare combination of GORGEOUS evocative prose with incredible story-telling & characters & a plot I was dying to know the end of. A story of loss, guilt and belonging that will stay with me for a very long time. Highly recommend .

Ok I had to gather my thoughts to write a thoughtful review. What an incredible book! My first 5 star read of 2023.
This book is a family saga set in two time lines, with two narrators, Sook-Yin from Hong Kong starting in 1966. The second is her second daughter Lily from London about 30 years later.
The chapters are short, snappy but still in depth and profound. The world building made it very easy to imagine what their worlds looked like and what it was to live in them.
Sook-Yin moves to London by force and finds England to be harrowing.
After Lily gets a mysterious letter, she travels to Kowloon and discovers more about her mother and her family.
The relationship with Lily and her older sister Maya felt very very real and recognizable, and one of the best written sister-relationships I have ever read.
The book really has everything, history, heart, feeling, sadness.
It will make you feel all the feels. I cannot wait to read more by Wiz Wharton.

What a brilliantly vivid and sensitively told story!
I was immediately sucked in by Wharton’s prose. Her characters were real and the story and sense of mystery kept me hooked until the very end. Even the Acknowledgements was a treat to read!

What a beautiful debut novel from Wiz Wharton. The novel has a split timeline following Lily in 1997 and her mother Sook-Yin from 1966 when she is forced to move to London from Hong Kong.
Lily is her mid-twenties and having battled with her mental health for many years, her life is beginning to stagnate. She received a letter stating she is a benefactor of a wealthy businessman in Hong Kong, her mother's homeland. Having lost her mother at a young age, and her father and sister shutting down any discussion of the same, this offers Lily the opportunity to connect with and unravel her mother's past.
Sook-Yin leaves HK in 1966 to her (horrible) brother's demand to make something of herself and restore respectability to their family. We follow Sook-Yin's struggles as she tries to develop her life in an alien and often hostile city.
The path of both mother and daughter mirror each other beautifully and the battles faced by dual heritage families in 1960s London and a daughter of dual heritage in a tense Hong Kong during the 1997 handover.
The author's writing style is stunning and immersive and pulls you along through Lily and Sook Yin's stories.
Ghost Girl, Banana will be a must read for Summer 2023
This is an honest review in exchange for a NetGalley ARC

ThIS debut by Wiz Wharton is truly super! Incredible writing - with the two different timelines and cross cultural references. The cast of characters aware all very real and the two protagonists were exceptional.

The book was very well paced and for me, completely riveting. Highly recommend.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers, Hodder & Stoughton , for the ARC.

This unusual, challenging novel opens with an account of four-year-old Lily, en route to London, who is looking through an airplane window at the British countryside that unfolds below her. Several years later, we encounter Lily, now a young Londoner in the late 1990s, whose mental health is fragile. Her young adult story is alternated with recollections of her mother Sook-Yin’s life in the same city some thirty years earlier. Both women suffer from societal prejudices: Because she married an Englishman, Sook-Yin, a Hong Konger, is referred to as a ‘banana’ who is yellow on the outside but white on the inside; meanwhile her daughter Lily is called a ‘ghost girl’ when she embarks on a trip to Hong Kong. That the fates of these two women are inextricably linked is therefore already suggested in the novel's title. Underpinning the big themes of colonialism and political upheaval, race and class, memory and intergenerational trauma are frequent allusions to familial matters, and lots of subtle, multisensory descriptions of London and Hong Kong. A wondrous, unusual, highly readable novel that deserves a wide readership. Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for the free ARC I received that allowed me to produce this unbiased book review.

As ever in history, it is through individual human stories that we can trace the fate of nations. It is also how we come to see ourselves.

Wiz Wharton’s ‘Ghost Girl, Banana’ arrives at a time when the future of Hong Kong is in flux, and when the long arm of its past should not be forgotten.

The novel is rendered in two timelines. In 1997, we meet Lily who is confronted by a mystery - why has a stranger in Hong Kong left her a substantial sum of money in his will? 1997 is of course a pivotal moment in the history of Hong Kong, the year the one-time British colony was handed back to China. The last significant British overseas territory, it was and is an economic powerhouse; and the Handover marked the political severing of a link that had lasted 156 years.

Such links run deep in this book, threading through the many families whose experiences spread between Hong Kong and the UK over many decades. Immigration into the UK particularly ramped up during the 1960s, and in the novel’s second timeline we find out how Lily’s mother, Sook-Yin, is exiled by her family, made to travel to the UK on a one-way ticket, and how her life unfurls.

The stories of both women are cleverly intertwined, told with compassion, wit and an appreciation for the random complexity of family relationships. Their experiences are often parallel, separated in time yet complimentary, and as the action moves between the UK and Hong Kong and back again, the reader too encounters sudden immersions in different, sometimes difficult, cultural experiences.

Wharton’s gift for a quotable line lights up every page, making this a visually stunning read (‘Roads as thin as noodles flashed past in a blur of grime…’) as well as a deep dive into the psychology of the many colourful characters, their motivations, hopes, dreams and dilemmas. As such, it’s a very humane work that emphasises joy, love, light and laughter as much as it reveals the shifting sands of racism, intimidation, hardship and indifference.

The novel contains many rich and powerful themes, but the one that struck me most was connection. The shared paths of the two main characters; the link between past and present; the patterns we repeat without knowing it, and the secrets we carry. Also, the shared past of two nations and the people who endured - finding the way when there was one, or making a way when there wasn’t.

‘Ghost Girl, Banana’ is a beautifully written, intelligent novel of two women navigating a brave new world to find the answers they need, then standing by their decisions and living with their discoveries. ‘I had lived through other moments like this – that feeling of standing on the precipice of something already set in motion that I couldn’t see past or take back…’

It is sure to be a highlight of 2023.

With thanks to Hodder & Stoughton and NetGalley for the ARC.

A fascinating, heartfelt story, beautifully told. The setting and characters were richly brought to life and I liked how the central mystery was carefully unravelled across both time strands. I'd definitely recommend Ghost Girl, Banana.

I knew from the first page of Ghost Girl, Banana that I was going to fall for this book in a big way. This is when we first meet Lily, as four-year-old girl in red sandals who is looking down through an aeroplane window at a ‘Blue Peter landscape’ of England below. Along with her sister, she is returning to London, unbearably bereft.
When we next meet Lily it is 1997 and she is lost in new and not so new ways, navigating doctors and clinics and her mental health and the mess of being adrift in London in the 90s.
Lily’s story alternates with that of her mother, Sook-Yin, who came to London from Hong Kong in 1966 and when a letter about a mysterious inheritance sets Lily on a path to Hong Kong on the eve of the Handover, Lily’s and her mother’s stories begin to converge in compelling, heart-breaking ways.
I found Sook-Yin’s story incredibly poignant; it’s an intimate portrait that gives a voice to other women of the Chinese Windrush generation – but I think will also resonate with the experiences of women from other marginalised communities, before 1966 and ever since.
The intricate plot is brilliantly brought to life, but for me it’s also the beauty of the writing that shines out. Whether describing the Hong Kong streets where the air is ‘a soup of clove oil and talcum’ or a lunch in London where ‘the brume of vegetables boiled to surrender hung heavy over the table’, you’re right there with Lily or Sook-Yin.
This is an expertly woven story about how guilt and grief can tear apart a family and then the slow, painful rebuilding of selves and bonds. Ultimately, it’s a celebration of love and dual heritages.
It’s a book I feel lucky to have been able to read as a proof but I’ll be buying it too because this one to treasure and hold on to.