The Fortune Writer

At eleven years old, Winnie Lau writes fourteen fortunes on the back of a spelling test.

Her aunt's fortune cookie factory occupies eleven feet of an alley in San Francisco's Chinatown. It has been running on the same book of sayings since 1974, and the book has now been photocopied so many times that the letters have closed up. Page 211 is a rectangle of static. Page 212 says only YOU WILL.

Somebody in that room needs to have good handwriting.

Over the next thirty years, Winnie writes the luck of four hundred million strangers. She is paid a dollar a week, then five. She works out at thirteen that there are only four things a stranger can ever say to you that will help, writes them down in pencil, and hides the page under her winter clothes because she is afraid of what it means.

She will spend the rest of her life being proved right.

Her grandmother's immigration file stays open for fourteen years because of a wrong apartment number. Her aunt loses the nerve endings in both hands and demonstrates it for tourists at fifty cents a photograph. Her mother folds towels on the night shift a mile away. And Winnie goes on producing, at industrial volume, the one sentence nobody in her family has ever been handed.

THE FORTUNE WRITER is a novel about the manufacture of hope and the wage it is made at. About the difference between a business and the records a business is required to keep. About tour guides, health inspectors, brand consultancies, relief applications, and a brass plaque bolted to the wall of the wrong building.

And about the four seconds between the meal and the check, in which somebody who does not know you says a true-shaped thing and wants nothing in return.

105 chapters. Four kinds of fortune.