Kit Fan Goodbye Chinatown review and information of the content of the new novel by the Hong Kong author now living in the USA. World Editions will publish the new Kit Fan novel, on June 2, 2026. Here you can read information about the content of the book, the author and the publication.
Kit Fan Goodbye Chinatown reviews
- “Shifting between the austerity of the convent and the squalor of the shantytown, Mr. Fan creates a textured, unsettled portrait of a territory facing a decisive ending … The dark drama that unfolds is an elegy to that vanished vanishing world.” (Wall Street Journal, about Diamond Hill)
- “Kit Fan plunges us face-first into the pungently sordid world of Diamond Hill in his debut novel … Fan is an exuberant chronicler of a lost time and place, delightedly preserving Cantonese slang and profanities … It’s a timely consideration of Hong Kong’s recent past.” (The Times, about Diamond Hill)
Goodbye Chinatown
- Author: Kit Fan (Hong Kong)
- Book type: Hong Kong novel
- Publisher: World Editions
- Released: June 2, 2026
- Length: 268 pages
- Format: paperback / ebook
- Prize: $ 19.99
- Order book from: Amazon / Bol
Blurb of the Kit Fan novel about Hong Kong
As her native Hong Kong seethes, torn between two world powers, Amber Fan tries to build a career as a chef in London’s Chinatown.
Amber Fan, a young Oxford-educated chef, opens the first Chinese fusion joint in London’s Chinatown following the failure of her father’s traditional restaurant. When her parents decide to return to Hong Kong, taking with them their young son Bobby as well as the haunting secret surrounding his birth, Amber is left alone in London. That is, until a woman called Celeste hires out the restaurant, coughing up three grand for a dinner for one. Who is this extravagant stranger, and how did she get so wealthy?
Set in the aftermath of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule, Goodbye Chinatownshows a family torn between two countries. Amber throws herself into her career to escape the painful cycle of family separations and reunions. The tastes and smells spark off every page in Kit Fan’s latest novel, making for a truly multisensorial reading experience. Offering a behind-the-scenes of this suburb of London’s hospitality economy, and using food to reflect on identity, Goodbye Chinatown paints a portrait of an enterprising émigré who, faced with divided loyalties, invents her own language for home through the culinary arts.
Kit Fan was born in Hong Kong and moved to the UK at the age of twenty-one. In 2017 and 2018 he was shortlisted for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize for “Duty Free” and “City of Culture” respectively. He studied at the Chinese University of Hong Kong before completing a PhD on Thom Gunn at the University of York. Also a poet, his second book of poems, As Slow As Possible was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2018, one of the Guardian’s 50 biggest books in Autumn 2018, and the Irish Times Poetry Book of the Year. He was invited by the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon to be a visiting scholar in 2020. In 2018 he won a Northern Writers’ Award for Diamond Hill. He lives and works in York.