In “How Much of These Hills Is Gold,” the siblings, Lucy and Sam, go into survival mode after their father dies and they are left penniless in a hostile town. “One thing I wanted to reflect on in the book was how when you mourn in a way that is repressed, it will haunt you,” Zhang said. “You can’t get away from it.”

Image C Pam Zhang’s “How Much of These Hills Is Gold” comes out April 7.

Born in Beijing (the C in her name is short for Chenji), she moved to the United States, where her parents were already living, when she was 4. She had 10 different addresses by the time she was 18, as her parents sought out better job opportunities or school systems for her and her younger sister. But one move stands out. When Zhang was 8, the family packed up their car and drove from Lexington, Ky., to Salinas, Calif.

“I was so struck by the landscape of America,” she said, recalling areas where they were pounded by torrential rain or in the plains of Oklahoma, where she could see weather patterns from miles away. “It’s really beautiful but also, in many parts of the country, extremely bleak and kind of scary.”

Those lasting impressions informed her reading habits. A fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder and John Steinbeck, she said, “Eventually I realized that the people in these books that I loved were always white. I wanted to write a great American epic in which I saw myself reflected.”

Sarah McGrath, who edited the book, said that reading it reminded her of Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad” or Mohsin Hamid’s “Exit West,” which “help me understand our culture and our history in a new way, not by telling it directly, but by showing it through emotion and relationships and its art.”

“How Much of These Hills Is Gold” is one of several new or forthcoming books by Asian-American writers set in 1800s America. There is “The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu” by Tom Lin, forthcoming from Little, Brown, which is set 150 years ago and follows a Chinese-American assassin seeking revenge after his wife is abducted. “Prairie Lotus,” published last month, is a book for young readers that its author, the Korean-American writer Linda Sue Park, describes as a “painful reconciliation” of her youthful love of Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” books with the sometimes racist views they espoused.