A Moment of Truth: A Guest Post by Kevin Kwan

By Kevin Kwan / May 22, 2024 at 1:16 am

Kevin Kwan is back with Lies and Weddings, a novel of glamorous parties, glitzy vacations and vengeful families who would do anything to keep their secrets hidden. Join us for the wedding of the summer and read all about the creation of this book in Kwan’s exclusive essay, down below.

Hardcover $20.30 ~~$29.00~~

Lies and Weddings: A Novel

By Kevin Kwan

In Stock Online

Hardcover $20.30 ~~$29.00~~

A screamingly funny novel about secrets and lies (and weddings) from the author of Crazy Rich Asians.

I was invited by a friend to spend the week between Christmas and New Year’s 2021 at her house on the beautiful island of Hawai’i, which is often called “the big island” since all the other Hawaiian Islands could actually fit inside it. A few days into the visit the most unexpected thing happened—stories started flooding my head and I began to write a chapter a day of what would become my new novel Lies and Weddings. I say “unexpected”, but with a live volcano churning pure creativity underneath my feet, was it really? Suddenly I was taken to 1990’s Hong Kong and current-day London, from the skies above Marrakesh and the waterways of Venice to the very island I was writing on. As the story started to take shape, one thing was certain, I needed to stay put on that amazing island and not interrupt the flow. I know, what a rough life.

So now it’s a few years later and Lies and Weddings is finally here! The story revolves around the Greshams, a grand old English family that sets the standard for international high society.  They’re in all the magazines and on all the socials always looking picture perfect, but secretly they’ve gone totally broke. The matriarch Lady Arabella Leong Gresham, who’s originally from Hong Kong, thinks the only way to save the family is for her dashing son Rufus to marry the richest heiress she can find.  But unfortunately for her, Rufus has other plans. As with all my books, the stories are inspired by true events. I’ve been lucky enough to be invited to some incredible weddings—one of which took place at three different European palaces over the course of a week. I did know a very aristocratic family that flaunted their wealth and threw the most spectacular parties but were secretly scrambling under mountains of debt. And I do have a friend that was once mistaken for her own children’s nanny because she is Asian and her young kids looked British. I took all these stories, and inspired by many great novels set in magnificent English manors, wrote a book filled with elaborate scheming, long-buried secrets itching to get out, and—since it’s all set at over-the-top destination weddings around the world where the food is sumptuous and the expensive wine is flowing—lots of crazy relatives behaving badly.

Ideally, a wedding is a moment of truth. It’s when we get to put away everything that has come before and move forward into everything that is yet to come. But when the family is as outrageous as this one and everyone is struggling with all the secrets that keep piling up, a moment of truth looks less like an elegant declaration of love and a lot more like an erupting volcano.

I hope you’ll join me, put your feet up and be my plus one to all these fabulous weddings. And have even more fun reading it than I had writing it!