Like The Fast and the Furious movies, Portrait of a Thief is part heist, part about finding a family with those around you, author says
- Grace D. Li’s debut novel Portrait of a Thief elevates the heist genre with its focus on young Chinese-Americans and their relationship with a faraway homeland
- Li’s book is also about identity – on top of the audacious Chinese art heists they commit, the cast of college students have to deal with family, love and jobs
Portrait of a Thief, by Grace D. Li. Published by Tiny Reparations Books
Grace D. Li is extremely busy. She has just published one of the year’s most talked about crime novels, Portrait of a Thief. She is on the road fulfilling a hectic marketing schedule while also executive producing an adaptation of the book for Netflix. In addition, she is about to start her residency at Stanford University’s medical school in the US state of California.
As a debut author, Li has pulled off a neat trick. She has written a heist novel in the grand tradition of hits from To Catch a Thief to Ocean’s Eleven. But, once you’ve been sucked in by the gripping premise and action, it is also an identity novel: the cast are not the hardbitten, all-action types of the Ocean’s movies. Neither are they the suave sophisticates of To Catch a Thief.
Their mission, which they accept after some understandable umming-and-ahhing, is to steal back artefacts looted from Beijing’s Summer Palace during the second opium war (1856-1860). If you are thinking, “I’ve heard that before,” you have, but not quite like this.
