Published in 2023
400 pages
Wiz Wharton was born in London of Chinese-European heritage. She is a prize-winning graduate of the National Film and Television School where she studied screenwriting under filmmakers Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh, and Ken Trodd. She and her work have been featured on various broadcast platforms, including radio, television and in print. She was the 2020 winner of The Jericho Writers Self Edit Bursary and a finalist in The DHA Open Writers Week. She currently divides her time between London and the Scottish Highlands.
What is this book about?
Set between the last years of the “Chinese Windrush” in 1966 and Hong Kong’s Handover to China in 1997, a mysterious inheritance sees a young woman from London uncovering buried secrets in her late mother’s homeland in this captivating, wry debut about family, identity, and the price of belonging.
Hong Kong, 1966. Sook-Yin is exiled from Kowloon to London with orders to restore honor to her family. But as she trains to become a nurse in cold and wet England, Sook-Yin realizes that, like so many transplants, she must carve out a destiny of her own to survive.
Thirty years later in London, having lost her mother as a small child, biracial misfit Lily can only remember what Maya, her preternaturally perfect older sister, has told her about Sook-Yin. Unexpectedly named in the will of a powerful Chinese stranger, Lily embarks on a secret pilgrimage across the world to discover the lost side of her identity and claim the reward. But just as change is coming to Hong Kong, so Lily learns Maya’s secrecy about their past has deep roots, and that good fortune comes at a price.
Heartfelt, wry and achingly real, Ghost Girl, Banana marks the stunning debut of a writer-to-watch.
