Long for This World (Hardcover)
Description
Sonya Chung's astonishing first novel tells the story of a family divided between contemporary America and a small Korean town. Long for This World is about loss and renewal and what it means to go home.
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.
About the Author
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.
Praise for Long for This World…
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
A wonderful and eminently readable novel, rich in cultural understanding and emotional insight. Sonya Chung is an extremely talented writer.
— Mary Yukari Waters, author of The Favorites and The Laws of Evening
The title of Chung's exquisite novel seems to be missing a word: "not long for this world" would be the easy, expected phrase. But little is easy or expected in this multilayered story of two brothers—one Korean and the other who chooses to become Korean American—and their scattered families, whose lives converge in a perfectly blended East/West house on a faraway Korean island. When Han Hyun-ku unexpectedly arrives at his younger brother's home, he is escaping an American life circumscribed by a detached wife and troubled son. His exhausted daughter, Jane, a renowned photojournalist of death and destruction, follows her missing father. Strangers that they are even among family, father and daughter are gratefully absorbed into a seemingly easy rhythm, but the temporary peace cannot ease inevitable tragedy. "Some people are not long for this world," Jane remarks. "The rest of us survive." VERDICT Readers who enjoyed superbly crafted, globe-trotting family sagas such as Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows, Naeem Murr's The Perfect Man, or Changrae Lee's A Gesture Life will swoon over Chung's breathtaking debut. —Terry Hong, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program, Washington, DC
