Portrait of a Thief

This is as much a novel as a reckoning * New York Times *A remarkably assured debut * Sunday Times *This is the heist novel we deserve. Brilliantly twisty and yet so contemplative, with characters whose complicated backgrounds color their every move, this book will continue to haunt you long after you’ve reached the end. * Jesse Q. Sutanto, author of Dial A for Aunties *Portrait of a Thief was everything I imagined and more. The writing felt close and intimate and the characters felt like portraits themselves, bursting with life and delicately human * Morgan Rogers, author of Honey Girl *Grace D. Li is a virtuosic storyteller … the most exciting debut I’ve read this year … an intelligent page-turner that will keep you hooked until the very end * Lauren Wilkinson, New York Times bestselling author of American Spy *In this slick, dazzling, debut, the stakes are high and the writing elegant. Here’s a story that offers not just adventure or a reprieve from the everyday, but big dreams, big hearts, enduring friendships, and the multitudes of identities that can exist within each one of us * Weike Wang, author of Chemistry *A beautiful examination of identity as children of the diaspora … This fast-paced heist leaves you clutching the pages and rooting for the thieves * Roselle Lim, author of Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune *A lyrical and action-packed tale of yearning, connection, self-discovery, and righting wrongs, Portrait of a Thief is a unique vision of what it means to come home * Delilah S. Dawson, New York Times bestselling author of The Violence *With the glitz of Crazy Rich Asians and the suspense of Ocean’s Eleven, Li’s debut is a fast-paced heist novel with the attendant glamour of priceless artifacts and a $50 million dollar payout * Washington Post *This clever debut is an absolutely thrilling ride from start to finish * Buzzfeed News *A tender and tenacious art-heist story wrapped around an intimate cultural history of extraction, Portrait of a Thief is a novel that names the unsutured wounds left by the violence of immigration, xenophobia, and diasporic longing in the lives of its Asian American characters, a story of the comradery of resistance and a testament to righteous grievance * Vulture *This is an entertaining read that has fun with familiar ideas while still managing to give them interesting twists * BookRiot *A cinematic heist thriller with a social conscience … Vivid and precisely crafted * BookPage *This is a remarkably assured debut that deftly uses its heist-caper framework to make its political points. – John Dugdale * Sunday Times *

Grace D. Li grew up in Houston, Texas and is a graduate of Duke University, where she studied biology and creative writing. She currently attends medical school at Stanford University. Portrait of a Thief is her debut novel.