The Last Story of Mina Lee: the Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick

Description

A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'I loved this book so much' REESE WITHERSPOON 'Suspenseful and deeply felt...raises questions about the reality of the American dream and illuminates stories that often go untold, in life as well as fiction' CHLOE BENJAMIN, bestselling author of The Immortalists Reminiscent of Celeste Ng's page-turning meditations on identity, this searing mother-daughter story explores the diverse and unsettling realities of being an immigrant in America. Margot Lee's mother is ignoring her calls. Margot cannot understand why, until she makes a surprise trip home to Koreatown, LA. What she finds there makes her realise how little she knows about her mother, Mina. Thirty years earlier, Mina Lee steps off a plane to take a chance on a new life in America. Stacking shelves at a Korean grocery store, the last thing she expects is to fall in love. But that moment will have shattering consequences for Mina, and everything she left behind in Seoul. Through the intimate lens of a mother and daughter who have struggled all their lives to understand each other, Margot and Mina's story unravels the unspoken secrets that can drive two people apart - or perhaps bind them closer together. --- 'Carefully illuminates the two sides of the silence between a Korean immigrant mother and her Korean American daughter, a silence only too familiar to many of us - and emerges with a stunningly powerful and original novel' ALEXANDER CHEE, bestselling author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Nancy Jooyoun Kim is a graduate of UCLA and the University of Washington, Seattle. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, NPR/PRI's Selected Shorts, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Asian American Writers' Workshop's The Margins, The Offing and elsewhere.

Suspenseful and deeply felt . . . raises questions about the reality of the American dream and illuminates stories that often go untold, in life as well as fiction A stunningly powerful and original novel about social class, immigration and family A beautiful debut novel that is unafraid to delve into the scary, deeply vulnerable places of our hearts Haunting and heartbreaking, troubled threads between a mother and daughter blend together in a delicate and rich weave - Booklist, STARRED review