Paperback: Happy Families (2021) is a charming, uplifting story revolving around three generations of a Chinese family in a Welsh city and the resentments, secrets and grudges that have come to define them – and how they must be overcome if harmony is to be restored.
The novel tells the story of three generations, two secrets and one extended family in rural Wales.
Amy is thirty-four and has just given up her glittering career in the big Welsh city to move back in with her grandfather, returning to work in the small-town Chinese takeaway where she spent her bookish and boring childhood.
Why? That's a secret she won't tell.
Just like the secret of why her grandfather, Ah Goong, and her father, TC Li, haven't spoken to each other in thirty years. Weirder still, they have lived in the same small flat above the takeaway for the majority of those years, with Amy's mother Joan acting as their unfortunate go-between and buffer.
Now Amy's parents have moved, leaving her in charge of looking after the old man. But then Ah Goong collapses in the street and Amy realises time is running out if she wants to play happy families again.
This refreshing and original debut is the winner of the Richard & Judy Search for a Bestseller 2020.
About the author: Julie Ma is the winner of the Richard and Judy Search for a Bestseller 2020. Happy Families is her debut novel.
As she now has an Amazon Author Page, she thinks she can legitimately call herself a writer. The time she wrote online product reviews for £0.03 per word probably did not count. Neither did the times she wrote replies to customer complaints for Virgin Media, Santander, Lloyds Bank and BT. She firmly believes in the ratio of 70% backside-in-the-chair writing time and 30% thinking about writing while walking a dog. Her most glamorous moment was being kindly congratulated on winning the competition while bending over to scoop some poop. She lives in west Wales with far too many members of her immediate family a stone’s throw away.
Rating: 5/5
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