Sunset at Lion Rock
By Matthew Wong Foreman
Where to Purchase: Bookshop.org. (see below)
7.13 Books
Pub Date: September 15, 2026
What It's About
Sunset at Lion Rock is a coming-of-age novel set in post-Handover Hong Kong, in the years after Britain returned the city to China in 1997. Eric is the son of a Hong Kong Chinese mother and the British man who taught her English. He grows up Wasian and illegitimate, raised by a devoutly Buddhist mother, aunt, and grandmother who believe he is the reincarnation of his dead uncle. He moves through a city that seems determined to forget its own history, and he never quite finds his place anywhere inside it.
Foreman takes Eric from childhood into adulthood, through the faith he is handed, the schools he doesn't fit into, and eventually into Hong Kong at one of its most charged political moments. I'll leave the rest for you to find.
What Stuck With Me
Eric is Wasian. Mixed white-and-Asian identity is having a real cultural moment right now, but that hasn't always been the case, and it isn't the world Eric grows up in. I'm the W in my family's Wasianness, and I'm also first-generation of a different ethnic mix, so to a point, I know the specific feeling of not being quite enough in any of your cultures, but my experience is still not the same. The people I love most wear a difference on their faces that I don't, and I've watched what that costs in a way I'll never fully understand from the inside. This book is about that.
The detail I keep coming back to is Eric at the wealthier school, surrounded by kids who belong there in a way he doesn't, drifting instead toward the ones on the outside and still not quite fitting with them either. Never enough of one thing or the other.
The book is also deeply Buddhist. Eric's mother and grandmother live inside their faith, and Foreman shares that experience. The religious sections are long and fully committed. They're the place Eric's family tries to save him, and the thing he eventually has to question.
My Takeaway
This book is definitely worth the read. By the end I wanted to reach through the page and tell Eric he was okay. That's the whole thing, really. He spends the book being told who he is, by his family through their silence, his faith, his city, his history, and you spend it wanting him to get to choose for himself.
I closed this book thinking about every door that opens onto a world that won't necessarily be kinder. If you've ever stood between two cultures and felt the edges of both, you will understand this one at a different level, and if you haven't it will give you a peek at the type of turmoil this can sometimes bring.
In the Author's notes Foreman thanks Ocean Vuong for making him feel like his story was worth telling. I am glad he found the strength and the representation he needed to write this book.
Where to Purchase
If You Liked This
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, for the lyric coming-of-age.
The Gangster We Are All Looking For by lê thi diem thúy, for the fractured, in-between childhood and the same kind of language.
Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, for the weight of mixed heritage and a history that won't let go.
Babel by R.F. Kuang is the looser fit, but it's there too: the in-between identity, the pull toward Britain, the cost of history. Take away the magic and a lot of Eric is in Robin.
Thank you to 7.13 Books for the advance copy. This review reflects my honest opinion.
