“The Expatriates,” by New York-based author Janice Y.K. Lee, is purely fictional. And yet the book offers both a commentary on the rarified life of the Hong Kong expat and an exploration of female lives.

Ms. Lee, the best-selling author of “The Piano Teacher,” a historical novel also based in Hong Kong, describes in the novel what it’s like to be an expat newbie: “When she first arrived in Hong Kong, she went through that rite of tribe forming, the social ritual she hadn’t engaged in since high school or college … A new crop,...