Excerpt from The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

“Please, Grandmother!” she cried, her siblings now chiming in, too.

The farmer became enraged and grabbed her brother roughly by the arm, yanking him up like a doll. Ji-Young shrieked in pain and the farmer’s wife asked her husband to stop. But he then grabbed June the same way and tried to pull her up to her feet. She resisted and he clasped her shirt and would have almost pulled it off, had she not leaned in and bitten him hard on his bony, darkly tanned forearm. The farmer shouted an obscenity and flung her wildly behind him, sending her crashing against a neat stack of kindling near the step-down to the tiny kitchen. June lay on the floor, her back and side afire with pain. For a moment all in the house seemed suspended, everyone staring at her, before she realized that it was not her they were looking at; part of the stack had fallen away, exposing the lid of a large earthenware barrel hidden behind the kindling. The farmer’s wife immediately knelt and tried to gather the loose branches to place them again before the barrel.

Someone barked, “Hey, old-timer, why didn’t you show us that last night?”

“Yeah, let’s see what’s in the jar.”

Indeed, when his wife had prepared the pot of porridge, he’d made a special point of showing the inside of a similar vessel, which was practically empty save a cup for scooping.

“It’s none of your business!” the farmer said. “None at all. Look here, I’ve been patient with all of you! We have nothing to give anymore. Now let us have our home again!”

One of the middle-aged men who’d been smoking now stood before the farmer. His cheeks were rough, his eyes lightless and deeply set. He was a head taller than the farmer and much broader, though still thin like everyone else, and he spoke without any hint of jest in his voice: “Just show us what’s inside.”

“I won’t!” the farmer said.

The man brushed past him. But before he’d taken a second step the farmer pulled a wooden baton from under his shirt and hit him in the back of the head. The man fell straight down, as if dropped from a great height. He landed headfirst, with an ugly, hollow sound. June scooted away as some men attended to him; his face was pinched against the hard floor, dark, thick blood streaming from his nose. The farmer stood dazed as they tried to revive him, but it was no use.

“He’s killed him,” one of them said.

“With his back turned, no less!”

The farmer was already retreating against the wall when they rushed him. He held back the first man with his baton but the others quickly overwhelmed him, punching and kicking him as he crumpled to the floor. His wife was screaming for them to stop. But they beat him until he was curled up in a ball, covering his head, crying out like a pitiful boy in a schoolyard, his mouth webbed with bloodied strings of spit.

It was then that the house was ransacked. Everyone took part. Even many of those who’d begun hiking back to the main road, including the blind man and his mother, returned to force their way back inside. There was no use in doing anything else. It took perhaps all of a few minutes, for how little of value there was. First the hidden earthenware barrel was dumped, which was only half full of dried corn, then the larder of dry goods, and then the kitchen was stripped of pots and utensils and of anything else someone was willing to carry away. June and her siblings scooped up as much of the corn as they could; Ji-Young even used his mouth, jamming it with kernels when his shallow pockets were filled. (Later on he spit them up into June’s hand and she rinsed them in the next stream they crossed.) Somebody broke off the lock on the clothes chest and women were rifling through it, June lucky to grab a blanket that fell between two women as they struggled over a silk blouse. The blanket was of light weight but large, and June knew it would be useful. The rest was just old people’s clothes, worn and stained. In the end the house was in shambles, the floor a mess of pottery shards and torn fabric, smashed bits of furniture, every last object picked through and taken apart, and if not stolen, then instantly rendered worthless, and as the three of them left, June ordered her siblings to look away from the farmer’s wife, who was still kneeling over her half-conscious husband, her face pure madness, screaming as if she were slowly being murdered.

Excerpted from The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee. Copyright © 2010 by Chang-rae Lee. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.