When We Were Orphans

FINALIST FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of Never Let Me Go, Klara and the Sun and The Remains of the Day.

England, 1930s. Christopher Banks is the country’s most celebrated detective, his cases the talk of London society. Yet one mystery haunts him: the disappearance of his parents in old Shanghai when he was a boy. Returning to the labyrinthine city of his memory, Banks seeks answers to his painful past, only to find Shanghai ravaged by war—and his own recollections as unreliable as the people around him. Masterful, suspenseful and psychologically acute, When We Were Orphans is a haunting meditation on the shifting quality of memory, and the possibility of reclaiming one’s past.