The tireless staff of the Beijing Duck, a Chinese restaurant in Rockville, Maryland, form the cast of this Women’s prize-longlisted intergenerational family saga. The oldest is Ah-Jack, a veteran of the restaurant who can wrap duck in his sleep but no longer carry heavy dishes from kitchen to dining room. New recruits Annie and Pat are the teenage children of staff members; together they skive and complain (“every day at a Chinese restaurant was bring-your-kid-to-work day,” Annie jokes). Multiple families, each with its roots in China, come together under the restaurant’s roof. “They were all friends,” Li writes, “if one defined friendship as the natural occurrence between people who, after colliding for decades, have finally eroded enough to fit together.” The restaurant’s owners, the Han brothers, manage tensions among the staff.

This is Li’s debut, yet she writes with a confidence that suggests decades of experience. Descriptions are imaginative and evocative; when Ah-Jack takes his friend’s hand, it opens acceptingly, “like a mollusc”; an eel dish, “buttery and sweet”, flakes “against [Jimmy’s] tongue like snow”. Uncle Pang, a gangster and “VIP” patron of the restaurant whose presence is felt throughout, is “like the moon. He might shrink, but he never goes away.” Relationships are complex and real: difficult and tense at times, but often loving and caring.

The restaurant contains a whole world – “a dying planet”, as Ah-Jack calls it, that is struggling to modernise. The staff at once resent and depend on the Beijing Duck, which has been designed to fit the stereotyped expectations of its white American patrons (“hopelessly Oriental”, with a “gaudy, overstuffed décor”). Owning it comes with responsibility; the Han brothers recognise that they have inherited not only a business but also its people, many of whom came to the US with nothing, but can now afford to provide better lives for their children.

This is an insightful and elegant novel, beautifully written and with an impressively large and diverse cast of characters. In the Beijing Duck, Li has created a symbol for the real Chinese restaurants through which many immigrant families have established themselves in America.

• Number One Chinese Restaurant is published by One (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.