Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother author, will make her fiction debut with a novel coming out this summer.
Minotaur will publish Chua’s The Golden Gate, the Macmillan imprint announced in a news release. The press describes the novel as “a sweeping, evocative, and compelling historical thriller that paints a vibrant portrait of a California buffeted by the turbulent crosswinds of a world at war and a society about to undergo massive change.”
Chua, a Yale Law School professor, is the author of several nonfiction books, including World on Fire and Day of Empire. In 2011, she published Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which chronicled how she raised her two daughters using Chinese child-rearing techniques. The book sparked fierce debate, became a bestseller, and introduced the term tiger mom into the national vocabulary.
Chua’s novel follows Al Sullivan, a Berkeley, California, police detective who investigates the slaying of a presidential candidate in a hotel room in 1944.
“Chua’s page-turning debut brings to life a historical era rife with turbulent social forces and groundbreaking forensic advances, when race and class defined the very essence of power, sex, and justice, and introduces a fascinating character in Detective Sullivan, a mixed race former Army officer who is still reckoning with his own history,” Minotaur says.
In a statement, Chua said that she crafted the novel “around actual events, like the Japanese American internment, labor unrest in the shipyards where America’s battleships were built, and the christening of the Golden Gate Bridge, as well as colorful real-life characters like Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and forensic pioneer August Vollmer of the Berkeley Police Department.”
The Golden Gate is scheduled for publication on Sept. 19.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
