The Surrendered

Product Description Chang-rae Lee, the bestselling and award-winning author of Native Speaker,Aloft, and My Year Abroadreturns with his most ambitious novel yet-a spellbinding story of how love and war echo through an entire lifetime. June Han was orphaned as a girl by the Korean War. Hector Brennan was a young GI who fled the petty tragedies of his small town to serve his country. When the war ended, their lives collided at a Korean orphanage, where they vied for the attention of Sylvie Tanner, a beautiful yet deeply damaged missionary. As Lee masterfully unfurls the stunning story of June, Hector, and Sylvie, he weaves a profound meditation on the nature of heroism and sacrifice, the power of love, and the possibilities for mercy, salvation, and surrendering oneself to another. Review [The Surrendered] is epic in scope, masterful in execution, heart stopping at times, and heartbreaking at others. The meticulous narrative unfolds over 52 years and across three continents. Nothing is rushed; nothing is overlooked. We can even feel the buzz of a window pane on our fingertips as rumbling Japanese military vehicles approach along a gravel road...Lee understands that in art and in stories what is perhaps most valuable is not what can be explained but what can be felt. -The Boston Globe This is not a happy book, but it is a rewarding one.The Surrendered grabs your attention-sometimes terrifying you in the process-and doesnt let go until its final moment...Its pages are breathtakingly alive. -The San Francisco Chronicle [Chang-rae Lees] largest, most ambitious book. -The New York Times Book Review Extremely well written, powerfully moving in places. -The New Yorker Lee...writes dense and gorgeous prose...Lee shows great tenderness for his [characters], even as he refuses them easy redemption. The final paragraph of his beautiful and tragic novel is as sublime and transcendent as any I can remember.A. -Entertainment Weekly The narrative sweep of the novel turns out to irresistible...a novel so rich in the hearty pleasures of storytelling. -Salon.com A landmark novel about love and war. . . Chang-rae LeesThe Surrendered . . . is impossible to put down. -O, The Oprah Magazine With his signature empathy and artistry, Lee links emotionally complex events. . . . Profoundly committed to authenticity, and in command of a remarkable gift for multidimensional metaphors, Lee dramatizes the guilt and mystery of survival in scenes of scalding horror and breathtaking beauty. . . . Lee has created a masterpiece of moral and psychological imagination unsparing in its illumination of the consequences of bloodshed and war. -Booklist (starred) Beautiful, riveting, piercingly haunting . . . The settings and times are masterfully interwoven to form an elegant, disturbing inquiry into courage, love, loyalty, and mercy. . . . This is a book to read in two or three long sittings, gulping pages, turning them as fast as possible to reach the perfect, inevitable ending. -Kate Christensen,Elle The odyssey of a Korean War refugee becomes first the subject of, then a haunting overture to, the award-winning Korean-American authors fourth novel. Lees introspective and interrogatory novels seek the sources of their characters strengths and weaknesses in their own, and their families stories- nowhere more powerfully than in this exhaustive chronicle of three hopeful lives tempered in the crucibles of wars and their enduring aftermaths. In a patiently developed and intermittently slowly paced narrative that covers a 30-year span and whose events occur in four countries and on three continents, the entangled histories of three protagonists are revealed. We first encounter 11-year-old June Han, traveling with her twin siblings following the deaths of their parents toward safety with their uncles family. Junes willed stoicism and suppression of fear serve her well in extremity