“A powerful novel that unflinchingly examines both the degrading lives of immigrants in the 1800s and the identity crises of modern mixes-race families. Throughout it all, Davies remains sympathetic to his heroes—although they have been all but lost in the flow of history, a deft hand can still pull them into prominence…The brilliance of The Fortunes is not that it expertly dissects Chinese American-ness–or American-ness, for that matter. Davies has conjured a book that forces its readers to find the pressures they face in their own lives, to see how the struggle of self-identity and one’s place in the world is alive in each and every one of us."—Shelf Awareness
“Absorbing."—New York Daily News, “7 books to read in September"
“The book is more than the sum of its parts, and Davies (the son of Welsh and Chinese parents) achieves an extraordinary novelistic intimacy against backdrops of historical vibrancy. Moreover, he considers what it means to be identified with, but not now belong to, an ancestral culture one can’t escape or fully embrace — in an immigrant society that promises but doesn’t deliver full racial inclusion." —Seattle Times