Last Night at the Telegraph Club

In 1954 San Francisco, seventeen-year-old Lily Hu, the daughter of Chinese immigrants in Chinatown, is drawn to her classmate Kathleen Miller. The two begin sneaking into the Telegraph Club, a lesbian bar where a male impersonator named Tommy Andrews performs, and Lily discovers a world and a feeling she has no words for at home. Against the backdrop of McCarthy-era Red Scare suspicion, which falls especially hard on Chinese Americans, Lily must weigh her family's expectations, her future, and her own safety against the truth of who she is and who she loves. Malinda Lo's National Book Award winner is a quietly devastating coming-of-age story about first love, identity, and the courage it takes to claim both.