Last Night at the Telegraph Club

Last Night at the Telegraph Club is a young adult historical novel by Malinda Lo set in San Francisco in 1954. Lily Hu is a seventeen-year-old Chinese American girl who has grown up in Chinatown, where her family values respectability and the community is under suspicion during the Red Scare. When Lily and her classmate Kathleen Miller begin sneaking out to the Telegraph Club, a nightclub where women perform and gather, Lily starts to understand her attraction to girls and to imagine a different kind of life. As her feelings for Kath grow, she has to weigh the risk of being discovered against what it would cost her to hide who she is. The novel brings a vivid, often overlooked chapter of American history to life. It won the 2021 National Book Award for Young People's Literature and received a 2022 Printz Honor.