Bookn' with Friends: "How Much of These Hills Is Gold" by C Pam Zhang

Bookn' with Friends, WPL's adult book club, will meet at 6:30pm on Monday, February 24 for a discussion of How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang.  Selected for the 2025 Reading Challenge "a western," this 2020 debut novel explores questions of home and belonging against the backdrop of a reimagined American West.  Longlisted for the Booker Prize and a New York Times Notable Book, How Much of These Hills Is Gold has a 3.8 rating on goodreads and is 288 pages long. Copies available to check out at the front desk beginning January 30.

More from the publisher:

An 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.

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.