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Journey Across the Four Seas: A Chinese Woman’s Search for Home is Veronica Li’s second book. It’s a memoir of a woman’s odyssey through 50 years of turbulence in Asia “from Hong Kong to Chungking to Nanking to Bangkok, and finally across the four seas to the U.S.” To be released this month, it has been getting rave reviews, as the cover endorsements show.

“This book is an amazing read,” wrote Adair Lara, San Francisco Chronicle award-winning columnist. “When I finished it, I felt as if I understood Hong Kong, China, the heroine Flora, and myself better. It’s the Asian Grapes of Wrath.”

Wrote Eduardo Lachica, former Washington bureau chief of The Asian Wall Street Journal (AWSJ): “A gutsy Chinese woman remembers with unsparing wit and candor growing up poor in British-ruled Hong Kong, surviving the perils and privations of Japanese-occupied China...This is history as biography that can bring nostalgia attacks to old Asia hands. It’s also an odyssey through life in the Chinese diaspora peopled with funny and outrageous real-life personalities Amy Tan couldn’t have imagined.”

South China Morning Post senior columnist Frank Ching said, “I love this book. It is the true story of one unusual woman who faces all of life’s adversities and overcomes them through sheer determination, grit and a bit of luck. While it is the story of one woman, it is also a story that millions of people will identify with. It has the makings of a bestseller.

After graduating as and English major at U.C. Berkeley, Veronica Li went back to Hong Kong, where she wrote for the news agency Agence France Presse, and in 1976, for ASWJ. She obtained a master’s degree in International Affairs from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in the District. She worked for the World Bank when China had just become a member. For six years, she traveled to East Asia to assess Bank-financed projects.

She transferred to Somalia and wrote the spy thriller Nightfall in Mogadishu as “my way of coming to terms with what had happened in Somalia.” Journey across the Four Seas “is about my mother’s life. I wrote it after my elderly parents moved in with me. To take care of them, I needed to come to terms with who they were.” The author lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, a former World Bank colleague.

298 pages; Publisher Homa and Sekey Books; List price $14.95. $12 at http://veronicali.com, and at publisher’s www.homabooks.com, and Amazon.com.