Expatriate translator Alice Mannegan spends her nights in Beijing's smoky bars, seeking fleeting encounters with Chinese men to blot out the shame of her racist father back in Texas.

But when she signs on to an archaeological expedition searching for the missing bones of Peking Man in China's remote Northwest deserts, her world cracks open.

As the group follows the trail of the Jesuit philosopher/paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin to close in on one of archaeology's greatest mysteries, Alice finds herself increasingly drawn to a Chinese professor who is shackled by his own painful memories.

[3]BookPage's Julie Checkoway called Lost in Translation an "ambitious debut novel" and highlighted the book's driving question: "Isn't ancestry, one's place in a personal, familial and cultural lineage, a difficult fact to ignore or erase?

"[4] Lisa See, writing for The New York Times, discussed how Mones "used her story to talk about race and racism, especially in the ways that Chinese and Americans view each other."