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Book Club | ATL Reads Virtual Book Club

Celebrate Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month and discuss Real Americans by Rachel Khong.

ATL Reads Book Club welcomes all who enjoy reading a variety of genres.

Read the book and chat with us!

This month's selection is the fiction novel Real Americans by Rachel Khong.

Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.

In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.

Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made? And if we are made, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?

Registration is required for online access. Registration closes at the start of the program.  

If you need assistance accessing the program, please contact the Customer Contact Center at 770-978-5154.

* Presented by Adult Services 

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