The Expat
A Novel
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
A fresh and vivid new voice brings a contemporary edge to the classic espionage novel.
A New York Times "Best Thrillers of the Year (So Far)"
At twenty-six, Princeton grad Michael Wang is trapped. Stifled under the bamboo ceiling at General Motors, he’s working quietly on a breakthrough in self-driving car technology that he hopes will catapult him out of obscurity. Disaffected and largely friendless in San Francisco, he’s dogged by resentment towards the Ivy Leaguers who never accepted him and his colleagues at GM who see him as passive and faceless.
But all that changes when one night, on a freelance coding platform, he meets the beautiful and enigmatic Vivian. She’s been admiring Michael’s work from afar and represents a rival Beijing tech company that’s eager to poach him as a newly minted executive, liberate his ideas from the stagnant confines of GM, and help him find success in the wilder, less regulated business environs of China.
For Michael—alienated and underappreciated—it’s no choice at all. But as soon as Michael arrives in Beijing, Vivian vanishes. When the true nature of his new position is made clear, Michael finds himself enmeshed in a dangerous web of industrial espionage and counterintelligence. Caught between two countries that view him as a pawn, where do his loyalties lie?
Piercingly intelligent and ruthlessly contemporary, The Expat is both a white-knuckle spy novel and a thrilling exploration of the myth of meritocracy, high-tech immigration, U.S.-China conflicts, identity, and disaffection that asks: in the pursuit of self-actualization, who will we betray and how far will we go?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shi's underwhelming debut follows a Chinese American tech worker who gets entangled in corporate espionage. In the late 2010s, 26-year-old software engineer Michael Wang works on autonomous car technology at General Motors. On a "Reddit meets Stack Exchange" forum for coders, he encounters a mysterious woman named Vivian, who entices him to attend a business meeting in San Francisco with venture capitalist Bo Song. During the meeting, Song persuades Michael to join Beijing-based startup Naveon as vice president, but makes a $250,000 sign-on bonus contingent on Michael covertly transferring General Motors software to Naveon, which he does without hesitation. The theft ensnares Michael in a treacherous cloak-and-dagger battle that reverberates to the highest levels of government in China and the U.S., and raises questions about which country deserves his loyalty. Despite the intriguing setup, an absence of tension and a bland protagonist keep the narrative from taking flight. This misses the mark.
