The Son of Good Fortune, Lysley Tenorio
The Son of Good Fortune, Lysley Tenorio
List: $23.99 | Sale: $16.79
Club: $11.99

The Son of Good Fortune
A Novel

Author: Lysley Tenorio

Narrator: Reuben Uy

Unabridged: 8 hr 30 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 07/07/2020


Synopsis

A Recommended Book From:
USA Today * The Chicago Tribune * Book Riot * Refinery 29 * InStyle * The Minneapolis Star-Tribune * Publishers Weekly * Baltimore Outloud * Omnivoracious * Lambda Literary * Goodreads * Lit Hub * The MillionsFINALIST FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE
WINNER OF THE NEW AMERICAN VOICES AWARDFrom award-winning author Lysley Tenorio, comes a big hearted debut novel following an undocumented Filipino son as he navigates his relationship with his mother, an uncertain future, and the place he calls homeExcel spends his days trying to seem like an unremarkable American teenager. When he’s not working at The Pie Who Loved Me (a spy-themed pizza shop) or passing the time with his girlfriend Sab (occasionally in one of their town’s seventeen cemeteries), he carefully avoids the spotlight.But Excel knows that his family is far from normal. His mother, Maxima, was once a Filipina B-movie action star who now makes her living scamming men online. The old man they live with is not his grandfather, but Maxima’s lifelong martial arts trainer. And years ago, on Excel’s tenth birthday, Maxima revealed a secret that he must keep forever. “We are ‘TNT’—tago ng tago,” she told him, “hiding and hiding.” Excel is undocumented—and one accidental slip could uproot his entire life.Casting aside the paranoia and secrecy of his childhood, Excel takes a leap, joining Sab on a journey south to a ramshackle desert town called Hello City. Populated by drifters, old hippies, and washed-up techies—and existing outside the normal constructs of American society—Hello City offers Excel a chance to forge his own path for the first time. But after so many years of trying to be invisible, who does he want to become? And is it possible to put down roots in a country that has always considered you an outsider?Thrumming with energy and at once critical and hopeful, The Son of Good Fortune is a luminous story of a mother and son testing the strength of their bond to their country—and to each other.

About Lysley Tenorio

Lysley Tenorio is the author of the novel The Son of Good Fortune and the story collection Monstress, named a book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Stegner fellowship, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Bogliasco Foundation. His stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, and have been adapted for the stage by The American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and the Ma-Yi Theater in New York City. He is a professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.


Reviews

Whether or not Excel, the nineteen year old undocumented Filipino, is a son of good fortune depends on which meaning of fortune is considered. Wealth or riches : no he’s definitely not a son of good fortune in this respect. He owes $10,000 for damages he caused at a place he fled to for several mont......more

Goodreads review by Michael

Very interesting coming-0f-age novel about an undocumented Filippino family in Oakland, CA. I enjoyed this one a lot. The themes of truth-untruth and real-fake as well as the focus on words (Z's dictionary, the many reflections on the H in Hello City, the spelling bee story) all blend together into......more

| | blog | tumblr | ko-fi | | “One of the perks of being born neither in America or the Philippines. The only history he needed to know was his own.” A few weeks ago I read Lysley Tenorio's collection of short stories, which had some real gems such as 'Monstress', and I was looking forward to readi......more