Bøker av Chang-rae Lee

From the award-winning author of Native Speaker and On Such a Full Sea, an exuberant and entertaining story of a young American whose life is transformed when a Chinese American businessman suddenly takes him under his wing on a global adventure. Tiller is an average college student with a good heart but minimal aspirations and talents. Then he meets Pong Lou, a successful Chinese American businessman, and everything changes. With Pong's unmatched charisma, richly varied interests and skills, enviable resources, and loyal circle of friends and business partners, he represents a life that Tiller has never imagined. When Pong invites Tiller along on a boisterous trip across Asia with no return ticket, Tiller is catapulted from ordinary young man to luxury globetrotter. In the process, he's pulled into a series of wholly unexpected experiences-some humorous, some heartbreaking, some darkly shocking, and all of which will alter the course of his life. A year later, passing through an American airport on his way home from this Asian adventure, Tiller takes up with an unlikely older woman and her son, and quickly slips from one life to another as he processes all he's experienced and what it will mean for his future. Told in alternating storylines, Tiller's tale weaves back and forth between his outlandish, memorable year with Pong, and the domestic adulthood that replaces it. From an award-winning writer known for exploring issues of culture and identity with provocative originality, My Year Abroad is a bold and exciting new novel about the people we meet who change our lives forever, and a brilliant satire/fable about entrepreneurship and the American dream.

On Such a Full Sea takes Chang-rae Lee's elegance of prose, his masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new plane. Stepping from the realistic and historical territories of his previous work, Lee brings us into a world created from scratch. Against a vividly imagined future America, Lee tells a stunning, surprising, and riveting story that will change the way readers think about the world they live in. In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighbourhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labour colonies. And the members of the labour class-descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China-find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labour settlement. In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan's journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind.

June Han has forged a life thousands of miles from her birthplace: she has built a business in New York, survived a husband, borne a child. But her past holds more secrets than she has ever been able to tell, and thirty years after her escape from war-ravaged Korea, the time has come for her to confront them.Hector Brennan, fighter, drinker and 'failure grand and total', is the man who long ago saved June's life. And between them lies the story of the beautiful, damaged Sylvie Tanner, whose elusive love they both once sought. On a journey that takes them from the scorched hillsides and abandoned rice paddies of a shattered Korea to a blood-soaked century-old Italian battlefield, together June and Hector go in search of their past, bound together by a legacy of shocking acts of violence and love.Compelling, suspenseful and unforgettable, THE SURRENDERED is a stunning epic of war, redemption and human longing. It is a masterpiece.

From one of America's finest writers comes a haunting evocation of the Japanese experience of the Second World War and the fate of their Korean 'comfort women'.