If a Kevin Kwan novel isn’t the very definition of a summer read, I don’t know what is. His bestselling trilogy about a superrich Singapore clan—Crazy Rich Asians (2013), China Rich Girlfriend (2015) and Rich People Problems (2017)—was a feast of designer clothes and luxury goods served up with a tasty side of social satire. It exploded into a bona fide pop-culture phenomenon with the box office success of the Crazy Rich Asians movie in 2018.

So Kwan’s latest novel, Sex and Vanity (Doubleday, June 30), arrives right on time. We open on the Isle of Capri as biracial Lucie Tang Churchill—part Chinese American, part WASP—arrives with her cousin/chaperon Charlotte Barclay for the destination wedding of a childhood friend. But once installed at the Hotel Bertolucci, they find that their rooms don’t have the promised ocean views. “What a sham!” That’s when fellow hotel guest Rosemary Zao—a nouveau riche Hong Kong matron accompanied by sexy surfer son George—offers to swap with them. If the setup calls to mind E.M. Forster’s classic A Room With a View, famously adapted for the screen by Merchant Ivory—well, you’re on to something.

Kwan spoke about the novel via Zoom from his home in Los Angeles, where he’s been sheltering in place during the pandemic. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How is your quarantine going? What are you reading?

I’m reading a ton, actually. I mean, I always read, but now more than ever. I discovered the work of Christopher Bollen. I started off reading A Beautiful Crime, his novel set in Venice, and just finished the novel he did before that, called The Destroyers. Another book that I read was Frances Cha’s If I Had Your Face, about a group of women from very disparate lives in Seoul, Korea, and it’s just the most searingly eye-opening look at contemporary Korea that I’ve ever experienced.

Let’s talk about Sex and Vanity. First, I want to say, thank you—it’s a total delight. And special bonus: It sent me back to A Room With a View, which I hadn’t read in decades.

Well, it had its moment, back in the mid-1980s, when the movie came out—it had a resurfacing. That’s when I discovered it.

Do you think of Sex and Vanity as an homage?

It really takes the premise as a departure point to tell a very, very different story, ultimately. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to travel to Capri quite frequently, and every time I was like, I want to set a story here. In the summertime, all these families from Europe, from around the world, gather, and the teenagers run loose. To me it was so fascinating to watch these young people—it’s summer, they’re hormonal and going crazy, you know? Island romances happen. I would even see it at my hotel. Knowing A Room With a View like I do, and seeing what’s happening in modern-day Capri—that was the departure point.

Lucy Honeychurch, the character [in A Room With a View], she’s straddling two worlds, in that she’s a girl of the Edwardian Age, and she’s really dragged down by the Victorian Age—her cousin, her parents, all the societal expectations. And she has to reckon with that as she comes into her own. And for my Lucie, Lucie Tang Churchill—how to create something that is the modern equivalent of that? To me, she had to be a biracial character, struggling with her internal self-identity. I just thought it was a really great opportunity to explore something meaningful that way.

At one point, Lucie says, “Don’t you see it’s possible to love someone without realizing you’re being racist toward them?” The white, blue-blooded side of her family loves her, but they’re not aware of the ways in which they constantly make her feel inferior.

Racism can exist even within your own family. How do these characters deal with the external racism and the internal racism that they feel? Because [Lucie] is racist against herself in many ways. As an Asian American immigrant, I went through that phase, too. In my journey of assimilation into the American culture, I had to sublimate everything about me that was Asian. It’s a process, as we all come to try to find level ground in this country.

The novel drops readers on Capri and then into the moneyed worlds of New York and the Hamptons. Did you have to do research?

I wish I could say that I’m some diligent researcher. But, really, I write about what I know. I moved to New York when I was 21 [to attend Parsons School of Design], and a lot of my closest friends are native New Yorkers who grew up on the Upper East Side. So I got to peek behind the curtain into this other world of privilege. For me, it was so comfortable and so easy because the high WASP aesthetic is similar to my experience growing up in Singapore in a family where it’s about not being showy—everything is about heirlooms, the older the better. I was sort of adopted by these families, and from basically Year 1 I was spending every summer in the Hamptons.

After all the success of Crazy Rich Asians, was it harder to write Sex and Vanity?

It really wasn’t. This was kind of a delight from start to finish. I wish I’d had more time, but I’m kind of glad I hammered it all out. You know, it had been brewing for 10 years; it was already percolating in my mind.

How long did the actual writing take?

I started in October and finished in January. So four months.

That’s amazing.

Yeah. It was just having that dedicated time to hit pause on everything else happening in my life.

Is there going to be a film?

I hope so, I really hope so. You know, my book is as much inspired by the film [of A Room With a View] as by the book. I’m ready.

Have you cast it in your head?

I absolutely have. But I don’t want to jinx things! [Laughs.]

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.