Porter Square Books: Boston Edition and GrubStreet are delighted to present the latest installment of the Grubbie Debut event series, featuring debut author Aube Rey Lescure! Join us for a celebration of her novel River East, River West on Thursday, January 11 at Porter Square Books: Boston Edition (50 Liberty Dr. Boston, Ma 02210). Author Stacy Mattingly will join Lescure in conversation, and the author talk will be followed by a signing line.

Set against the backdrop of developing modern China, this mesmerizing literary debut is part coming-of-age tale, part family and social drama, as it follows two generations searching for belonging and opportunity in a rapidly changing world—perfect for readers of Behold the Dreamers, White Ivy, and The Leavers.

Shanghai, 2007: Fourteen-year-old Alva has always longed for more. Raised by her American expat mother, she’s never known her Chinese father, and is certain a better life awaits them in America. But when her mother announces her engagement to their wealthy Chinese landlord, Lu Fang, Alva’s hopes are dashed, and so she plots for the next best thing: the American School in Shanghai. Upon admission, though, Alva is surprised to discover an institution run by an exclusive community of expats and the ever-wilder thrills of a city where foreigners can ostensibly act as they please.

1985: In the seaside city of Qingdao, Lu Fang is a young, married man and a lowly clerk in a shipping yard. Though he once dreamed of a bright future, he is one of many casualties in his country’s harsh political reforms. So when China opens its doors to the first wave of foreigners in decades, Lu Fang’s world is split wide open after he meets an American woman who makes him confront difficult questions about his current status in life, and how much will ever be enough.

In a stunning reversal of the east-to-west immigrant narrative and set against China’s political history and economic rise, River East, River West is an intimate family drama and a sharp social novel. Alternating between Alva and Lu Fang’s points of view, this is a profoundly moving exploration of race and class, cultural identity and belonging, and the often-false promise of the American Dream.

Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American writer who grew up between Shanghai, northern China, and the south of France. After receiving her B.A. from Yale University, she worked in foreign policy and has co-authored and translated two books on Chinese politics and economics. She was an Ivan Gold Fellow at the Writers’ Room of Boston, a Pauline Scheer Fellow at GrubStreet, and a finalist for the Boston Public Library Writer-in-Residence program. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Guernica, Best American Essays, The Florida Review online, WBUR, and more. She currently works as the deputy editor at Off Assignment. Her first novel, River East, River West, is forthcoming from William Morrow/HarperCollins in January 2024.

Stacy Mattingly is coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Unlikely Angel, an Atlanta hostage story now a feature film, Captive. Stacy’s work has appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, Oxford American, Off Assignment, EuropeNow, and elsewhere. In 2012 she launched the Sarajevo Writers’ Workshop in Bosnia and Herzegovina and later helped lead the first Narrative Witness exchange (Caracas-Sarajevo) for the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. An Atlanta native, Stacy teaches at Boston University and is an assistant professor at Berklee College of Music. Her recently completed first novel is set in the present-day Balkans.

Grubbie Debut: Aube Rey Lescure, author of River East, River West, in conversation with Stacy Mattingly