Gold Mountain Blues

One Family.

Five generations.

An epic story of love and loss.



China, 1879

With the Opium wars at their height, Fong Tak-Fat boards a ship to Canada, determined to make a life for himself and support his family back home. He will endure great hardship as he works to build the Pacific Railway and save every penny he makes to reunite his family.

Canada, 2004

Amy Smith knows nothing of her family history, a secret her mother will not share, until she is summoned to her ancestral home in China to collect the forgotten belongings of family members whom she has never met. Can Amy finally unlock the door to her past?

Telling the story of one family's journey through five generations and across the seas, Gold Mountain Blues is a heartrending tale of sacrifice, endurance, hope and survival.



Ling Zhang was born in 1957 in Hangzhou of Zhejiang Province in China and moved to Canada in 1986. She is the award-winning author of four novels and three collections of short stories. She currently lives in Toronto.

Nicky Harman translates fiction, and occasionally non-fiction and poetry from Chinese. She has won several awards, including the Mao Tai Cup People's Literature Chinese-English translation prize 2015, and the 2013 China International Translation Contest, Chinese-to-English section. When not translating, she blogs, mentors new translators, teaches summer schools, and judges translation competitions. She tweets as the China Fiction Bookclub @cfbcuk.



There are few writers who can fuse the stories of China and those of foreign lands together as seamlessly as Ling Zhang... I believe Ling Zhang will become an outstanding one among those Chinese writers who persevere in using Chinese language in their writings while living overseas.