The writer Kit Fan likes his readers to know, at least initially, where – and when – he is taking them.

His first novel, published in 2021 and set in 1987, is called Diamond Hill, and its location is mostly confined to the Hong Kong neighbourhood it is named after.

Diamond Hill was Hong Kong’s equivalent of Hollywood during its heyday after World War II. But by the late 1980s, it had lost its movie glamour. In that book, Fan played with a colourful, often profane, cast of nuns, triads and drug addicts amid the neighbourhood’s untidy shanties.

Five years later, Fan has released his new novel, Goodbye Chinatown. It begins in London’s Chinatown in the autumn of 2001, just after the September 11 terror attacks. This time, the character list is shorter – it is essentially a story about the parents and two children of one Hong Kong family – but the geographic range is greater.

The one constant amid the family’s roaming is food, a literary fusion signalled to the reader from the outset by the book’s epigraphs: one from fictional character Robinson Crusoe and one from food writer Nigella Lawson.