MY YEAR ABROAD | Chang-rae Lee | BUY BOOK
January 31, 2021
“My Year Abroad,” his sixth novel, is about letting yourself plunge into the world, even when it hurts. He’s been thinking about that a lot over these past, painful months.
There are times when Chang-rae Lee — Pulitzer fiction finalist, PEN/Hemingway Award winner, English professor at Stanford, beloved novelist with a sixth one on the way — wonders if he can write.
With every book he has published, he said, he has thought about the accolades he has received since his 1995 debut, Native Speaker, and thought: “This is all mirrors. It could dissipate. It’s fog.”
Over the years that Lee spent working on his latest novel, “My Year Abroad,” there were many moments, he said during a video interview from Honolulu, where he has been spending most of this month… more
ABOUT THE BOOK
“One of our most silken storytellers.” —The Boston Globe
“An extraordinary book, acrobatic on the level of the sentence, symphonic across its many movements—and this is a book that moves…My Year Abroad is a wild ride—a caper, a romance, a bildungsroman, and something of a satire of how to get filthy rich in rising Asia.” –Vogue
Tiller is an average American college student with a good heart but minimal aspirations. Pong Lou is a larger-than-life, wildly creative Chinese American entrepreneur who sees something intriguing in Tiller beyond his bored exterior and takes him under his wing. When Pong brings him along on a boisterous trip across Asia, Tiller is catapulted from ordinary young man to talented protégé, and pulled into a series of ever more extreme and eye-opening experiences that transform his view of the world, of Pong, and of himself.
In the breathtaking, “precise, elliptical prose” that Chang-rae Lee is known for (The New York Times), the narrative alternates between Tiller’s outlandish, mind-boggling year with Pong and the strange, riveting, emotionally complex domestic life that follows it, as Tiller processes what happened to him abroad and what it means for his future.
Rich with commentary on Western attitudes, Eastern stereotypes, capitalism, global trade, mental health, parenthood, mentorship, and more, My Year Abroad is also an exploration of the surprising effects of cultural immersion—on a young American in Asia, on a Chinese man in America, and on an unlikely couple hiding out in the suburbs.
Tinged at once with humor and darkness, electric with its accumulating surprises and suspense, My Year Abroad is a novel that only Chang-rae Lee could have written, and one that will be read and discussed for years to come.