Kirstin Chen is the New York Times bestselling author of three novels. Her latest, COUNTERFEIT, is a Reese Witherspoon book club pick, a Roxane Gay book club pick, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. It has also been recommended by The Washington Post, People Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, Vogue, Time, Oprah Daily, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Parade and more. Translation rights have sold in seven languages and television rights have been optioned by Sony Pictures. Her previous two novels are BURY WHAT WE CANNOT TAKE and SOY SAUCE FOR BEGINNERS.

She has received fellowships and awards from the Steinbeck Fellows Program, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Toji Cultural Foundation, and the National Arts Council of Singapore. Her writing has appeared in The Cut, Real Simple, Literary Hub, Writer’s Digest, Zyzzyva, and the Best New Singaporean Short Stories. She holds an MFA from Emerson College and a BA from Stanford University. Born and raised in Singapore, she lives in New York City.

Books by Kirstin Chen

Counterfeit

by Kirstin Chen - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Ava Wong is a strait-laced, rule-abiding Chinese American lawyer with a successful surgeon as a husband, a young son and a beautiful home. But beneath this façade, Ava’s world is crumbling. Enter Winnie Fang, Ava’s enigmatic college roommate from Mainland China, who abruptly dropped out under mysterious circumstances. Now, 20 years later, Winnie is looking to reconnect with her old friend. She has developed an ingenious counterfeit scheme that involves importing near-exact replicas of luxury handbags and now needs someone with a U.S. passport to help manage her business. But when their spectacular success is threatened and Winnie vanishes once again, Ava is left to face the consequences.

Soy Sauce for Beginners

by Kirstin Chen - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Gretchen Lin, adrift at the age of thirty, leaves her floundering marriage in San Francisco to move back to her childhood home in Singapore and immediately finds herself face-to-face with the twin headaches she’s avoided her entire adult life: her mother’s drinking problem and the machinations of her father’s artisanal soy sauce business.