Winner of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Winner of the Canadian Authors Association Emerging Writer Award
New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction Finalist
Kobo Emerging Writer Prize Finalist
Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction Finalist
Canada Reads Longlist
Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize Longlist
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection
McMaster University Common Reading Program Selection
Adler University Common Reading Program Selection
“In her sensitively wrought debut novel, For Today I Am a Boy, set in a sleepy and predominantly white town in Ontario, Kim Fu invites us inside the Huang household, where patriarchy rules, the mother tongue is forbidden — because it will make the children's English "come out wrong" — and a single pot of Cantonese-style white fungus soup can seem a potent threat to the painstaking “project of Westernization.”... [Fu] is intimately attuned to the anxieties of first-generation go-getters. Her novel abounds in recognizable archetypes of the model minority — the striving civil servant; the silent, servile wife; the academic superstar — but the story itself contemplates something larger: how to define and defend one's identity against the clamoring voices of expectation, from both family and society... For Today I Am a Boy is as much about the construction of self as the consequences of its unwilling destruction — and what happens when its acceptance seems as foreign as another country.”
—Jiayang Fan, New York Times Book Review
“Like a Mary Temple exhibition, with sunlight and shadows painted on the walls in endless variations on the colour white that a normal person could never tell apart if presented with them separately, For Today I Am A Boy is a tutorial in the many shades of longing… I’d wager a lot more people will know [Fu's] name before long.”
—S. Bear Bergman, National Post
“For Today I Am a Boy is an extraordinarily accomplished first novel, and Fu is a thrilling new voice. She’s at once compassionate toward her characters and uncompromising in her refusal of the usual novelistic resolutions of questions that remain intractable in lived experience. Lyrical, sometimes brutal, always beautiful, this is a brilliant book.”
—Garth Greenwell, Towleroad
“It has become cliché to hail an exciting ‘new voice’ in fiction, and many are drowned out by their own hype. […] Kim Fu should be an exception.”
—Trilby Kent, The Globe and Mail
“Kim Fu writes with a pen as sharp and precise as a lancet... A fiercely beautiful novel, the book is the perfect testimony to the fact that no one knows the last word about any human heart.”