Aube Rey Lescure: 00's China, Biracial Identity and Writing Alienation

Aube's debut novel, River East River West, is one of the most exciting releases of 2024. The dual timeline follows a 14 year old Alva in 2007 and how her American mother's new husband Lu Fang made his fortune in 1985. It's a complex unpacking of capitalism's failures, its effects on our relationships and the impact of increased Western business in Shanghai at the start of this century. River East River West has received praise from the Wall Street Journal, Oprah Daily and Asian Review of Books, as well as bestsellers Jean Kwok, Vanessa Hua and Catherine Cho. Info on Aube from her website: Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American writer. She grew up between Provence, northern China, and Shanghai, and graduated from Yale University in 2015. She worked in foreign policy before becoming an itinerant writer. Aube’s debut novel, River East, River West, was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins in January 2024. [Duckworth in the UK] Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Guernica, LitHub, Electric Literature, The Millions. WBUR, The Florida Review Online, Litro, and more. Her essay “At the Bend of the Road” was selected for Best American Essays 2022. She currently works as the Deputy Editor at Off Assignment. Two essays she edited are anthologized in Best American Travel Writing 2021, and four others were listed in Best American Essays Notables. Aube is the co-author of Creating a Stable Asia (Carnegie 2016) and the translator of Le Système Économique Chinois Face à ses Défis (éditions Nuvis 2017). Aube received support as an Ivan Gold Fellow at the Writers’ Room of Boston, a Pauline Scheer Fellow at GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator Program, and a writer-in-residence at the Studios of Key West and Willapa Bay AiR. An excerpt from her forthcoming novel was a semifinalist in the Boston Review’s 2020 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest. Her short fiction was selected as a finalist for BOMB Magazine’s 2021 Fiction Contest, judged by Ottessa Moshfegh. Find the book here. Or at your local seller.  For more literature, head to the sanclemente.co.uk, catch up on previous episodes or get ready for more this week.