VIRTUAL EVENT: C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills is Gold

Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes debut novelist C Pam Zhang for an online event about her new book, How Much of These Hills Is Gold. Zhang will be in conversation with fellow debut novelist Kawai Strong Washburn (Sharks in the Time of Saviors). In Zhang’s electric debut novel set against the twilight of the American gold rush, two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape—trying not just to survive but to find a home. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Register for this free Crowdcast event here.

This is a free event. The books may be purchased below.
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Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future.

Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and re-imagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, it’s about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.

“[An] extraordinary debut. . . Gorgeously written and fearlessly imagined, Zhang’s awe-inspiring novel introduces two indelible characters whose odyssey is as good as the gold they seek.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“C Pam Zhang’s debut is ferocious, dark and gleaming, a book erupting out of the interstices between myth and dream, between longing and belonging. How Much of These Hills Is Gold tells us that stories–like people, like the rough and stunning landscape of California itself–are constantly in the process of being made, broken, and finally remade into something tender and new.” —Lauren Groff, New York Times-bestselling author of Fates and Furies

“A ravishingly written revisionist story of the making of the West, C Pam Zhang’s debut is pure gold.” —Emma Donoghue, author of Room

Born in Beijing but mostly an artifact of the United States, C Pam Zhang has lived in thirteen cities across four countries and is still looking for home. She’s been awarded support from Tin House, Bread Loaf, Aspen Words and elsewhere, and currently lives in San Francisco.

Kawai Strong Washburn was born and raised on the Hamakua coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. His work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney’s, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among other outlets. He was a 2015 Tin House Summer Scholar and 2015 Bread Loaf work-study scholar. Today, he lives with his wife and daughters in Minneapolis. Sharks in the Time of Saviors is his first novel.