Alice Greenway is trying to remember where she spent her childhood. “I was born in Washington, then we moved to Hong Kong, then we moved to Thailand, then Boston. And — oh, I’ll have to write it down. Then we must have gone to Washington again, then Hong Kong, then Israel, then back to the States. I think I’ve got that right.”

As the daughter of a foreign correspondent, she has never quite put down roots. Five years ago, the 42-year-old American made yet another move — accompanying her journalist husband to Edinburgh.

She had never written a book before. But in her luggage was an unfinished manuscript detailing her Hong Kong childhood. Now she is on the Orange prize longlist and is doing book tours across America. Almost accidentally, she has anchored herself in Scotland’s literary scene.

Greenway’s book, White Ghost Girls, is a short, tightly written novel that charts the life of two American girls growing up in Hong Kong in 1967 while their journalist father covers the war in Vietnam. Kate, and her elder sister, Frankie, are on the cusp of adolescence.

Frankie, the more outgoing of the two girls, is beginning to throw herself at unsuitable older men. Kate is slowly becoming attracted to a deaf Chinese boy called Fish. Meanwhile, just offstage, there’s violence brewing. Over the border in China, the Cultural Revolution is getting into full swing and now Maoist supporters are conducting a bombing campaign in the British colony. The children’s mother tries to hide the newspaper each morning, protecting them from the unrest and danger that their father faces as he reports for Time-Life magazine, but this act of censorship only fuels their curiosity.

Kate narrates this story, looking back from adulthood, and we suspect from the outset that something terrible is going to happen.

“This summer, the one I’m going to tell you about, is the only time that matters,” she recalls. “It’s the time I’ll think of when I’m dying, just as another might recall a lost lover or regret a love they never had. For me, there is one story. It’s my sisters — Frankie’s.”

At first, there’s an overfamiliarity about the way White Ghost Girls is written. You feel you’ve read it before: the oppressive heat and beguiling smells (“dried oysters, clove hair oil, tiger balm, joss”), the exotic local legends, even the grumpy but loveable servant, Ah Bing, who chides the girls and fulfils the role of surrogate mother.

But Greenway has more strings to her bow than join-the-dots orientalism. Within a few chapters she puts a bomb — literally — under this comforting framework. The tragedy that is played out is told subtly. The writer doesn’t make the mistake of many first novelists of trying to fill in all the gaps; she’s brave enough to let the readers do a little work, and the book is infinitely more memorable as a result.

Where does fiction end and fact begin? “It started out very autobiographical,” she says. “I just wanted to write about Hong Kong. I really started it as a memoir. I had it in my mind to write like Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals. It became more and more fictional.”

Some bits more than others. Greenway has no memory of the Hong Kong bombings. She was only three at the time. “But because I was in Hong Kong aged three, I think it’s sunk in very deep. We lived there for two years, then moved back in the 1970s for another three years, then, after I left university” — Yale, where she studied Chinese history — “I worked there for the South China Morning Post. I still kind of consider Hong Kong my home.” she says.

“I don’t know why. When I get there I feel very nostalgic immediately. I remember how I was as a child, which I guess is what home is about.”

Inevitably, people will tend to associate Alice (small, blonde, softly spoken) with Kate, the narrator. She’s the quiet one, a born observer and keeper of secrets: the natural character of a narrator and a novelist. “I don’t think Kate is identical to me,” she says. “But if you’re talking about autobiographical things, I’m the middle of three sisters. We moved every two or three years and some suffered at different times more than others. We had the same basic ingredients but we all dealt with it in very different ways.”

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