Song

Michelle Jana Chan is an award-winning journalist and travel editor of Vanity Fair in the UK, where she presents the magazine's digital Future Series. Formerly, Michelle was a BBC TV presenter, a news producer at CNN Internationaland a reporter at Newsweek. She was a Morehead-Cain scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

'Jana Chan has produced a wonderfully lush and atmospheric odyssey of survival against all odds. This novel is steeped in empathy at the unfairness of poverty and hardship, and the injustice of a culture based on the old plutocracy, while also exploring the many acts of individual kindness that can change a person’s fortune. Ultimately, Jana Chan shows us how suffering and disadvantage can drive, rather than crush the human spirit' Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other 'Precise, heartfelt, breathtaking . . . Song will touch you with its remarkable odyssey and make you believe in dreams again' Elif Shafak, author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World 'A strong picaresque element powers this saga' Daily Mail 'Michelle Jana Chan brings a world of equal peril and possibility to life with her rich, radiant prose' Tatler 'A beautifully told tale with fascinating historical insight' Vanity Fair 'One of the Caribbean’s little-known stories' Times Literary Supplement 'Song offers a rare and compelling fictional exploration of the pioneering Chinese presence in British Guyana, in the eighteenth century. A powerful testimony to frontier life in Guyana's gold-mining interior' Jacob Ross, author of The Bone Readers 'A dazzling novel, brimming with psychological acuity. Chan conjures the sweet smells of Guiana, the shadow of an oil lamp and a filigree of leaves leaning over a river in swirling mist. An unforgettable portrait of a man and a little-known land' Sara Wheeler