A Paper Son
Gallery Books, 2016. (Formerly Tyrus Books)
Peregrine Long is a San Francisco public-school teacher who moonlights as a writer. When he begins publishing chapters of a serial in a local upstart journal, he is confronted by Eva Wong, a woman who claims to be the descendant of his characters. Eva is willing to forgive him the theft of her family's history—but she demands to know what happened to her Uncle Henry. And so Peregrine becomes a reluctant and unwitting guide in the search for a boy who vanished eighty years earlier. Joined by Annabel Nightingale, a fellow teacher immersed in her own mysteries, and his sister Lucy, who brings her own pieces of this
growing puzzle, Peregrine and Eva search modern day San Francisco—and, through his continued writing, southern China and the Pacific immigration experience of a century ago—for a missing boy. Along the way, Peregrine makes discoveries that lead him to question the nature of his writing, his understanding of his identity, and the relationship between storyteller and story.
“Buchholz’s gripping debut is a clever supernatural thriller that plays with readers’ narrative expectations. Rich, interesting characters fill this fast-paced, magical realist novel about family connections.”
— Publisher’s Weekly
“The rain will not stop falling on San Francisco. Third grade teacher Peregrine Long…begins to write about Li-Yu, the daughter of Chinese immigrants to America who travels in the 1920s to her husband’s home in China. …Peregrine thinks he’s creating her story…but an older woman shows up on his doorstep demanding to know why he is writing about her family history. That is only the beginning of a series of strange events that envelop Peregrine, his sister, and his girlfriend in this wonderfully imaginative novel. Buchholz constructs a world that is both familiar and strange, where magical events are layered on top of the everyday, the distinction between them not always clear. The mystery of the story, while a powerful driver of the book, becomes almost secondary to the wonder of it all.”
— Booklist
“...a prophetic and engrossing supernatural thriller examining how memory surfaces after a near death experience...a richly woven and haunting tale of memory, loss and identity, in which the ocean serves as the bridge that separates and binds the two distinct timelines together. A Paper Son is a magical journey through memory and history, with Peregrine acting as the medium for voices that were silenced and lost in the pre-World War II immigration void. What makes Buchholz's debut sing is not the mystery, but how the characters handle and rise above their exceptional circumstances to come to terms with a painful and forgotten period of Asian American history.”
— Shelf Awareness
“A Paper Son is a rivetingly imaginative debut full of deft humor and an affinity for the peculiar reminiscent of Auster and Calvino.”
— Jim Ruland, author of Make It Stop
“Buchholz’s first novel showcases an imagination turned up to 11. I dig books that keep me guessing, keep me gasping with every new page, each new reveal that contorts Realism into something vitally new. I was wonderfully off balance reading A Paper Son. You’ve never experienced anything like this.”
— Joshua Mohr, author of Saint the Terrifying
“A Paper Son is a fascinating exploration of blurred lines. Lines blurred between the past and present, of the real and imagined, of yearning and deliverance. A fine debut by Jason Buchholz.”
—Reed Farrel Coleman, New York Times Bestselling author of Robert B. Parker’s The Devil Wins