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In 1953, on a remote island in South Korea, a young boy stows away on the ferry that is carrying his older brother and sister-in-law to the mainland. Fifty-two years later, Han Hyun-kyu is on a plane back to Korea, leaving behind his wife and grown children in America. It is his daughter, Jane - a war photographer recently injured in a bombing in Baghdad and forced to return to New York - who journeys to find him in the South Korean town where his brothers have settled. Here, father and daughter take refuge from their demons, unearth passions, and, in the wake of tragedy, each discover something deeper and more enduring than they'd imagined possible.
Long for This World is a pointillist triumph - depicting whole worlds through the details of a carefully prepared meal or a dark childhood memory. But Chung is also working on a massive scale, effortlessly moving between domestic intimacies and the global stage - Iraq, Paris, Darfur, Syria - to illuminate the relationship between troubled world affairs and personal devastation. The result is a profound portrayal of the human experience - both large and small. Long for This World establishes Sonya Chung as a thrilling new voice in fiction.
"Chung portrays with precision and grace each character's struggle to find his or her place in the family and in the world." - Publishers Weekly
"An impressive but structurally unwieldy debut. " - Kirkus Reviews
"Starred Review. Readers who enjoyed superbly crafted, globe-trotting family sagas such as Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows ... will swoon over Chung's breathtaking debut." - Library Journal
"An intricately structured and powerfully resonant portrait of lives lived at the crossroads of culture, and a family torn between the old world and the new, Long for This World marks a powerful debut from a young writer of great talent and promise." - Kate Walbert, author of A Short History of Women and The Gardens of Kyoto
This information about Long for This World was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sonya Chung's short fiction and essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, BOMB Magazine, Cream City Review, and Sonora Review, among others. She is a recipient of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and the Bronx Council on the Arts Literary Fellowship & Residency. Long For This World is her first novel.
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