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    Long for This World: A Novel
    Long for This World: A Novel
    Long for This World: A Novel
    Audiobook9 hours

    Long for This World: A Novel

    Written by Sonya Chung

    Narrated by Hillary Huber

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    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, 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 author Sonya 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 Chung as a thrilling new voice in fiction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 22, 2010
    ISBN9781400186433
    Author

    Sonya Chung

    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.

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    Reviews for Long for This World

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    • 5/5
      A rare delight of lyrical beauty, skillful structure, and such real characters that I am convinced they are living and breathing on two continents.Han Hyun-ku travels unannounced to reunite with his family in Korea, having left decades before to make a new life in the States. He has left his alcoholic wife, the formidable Dr. Lee. His eldest daughter, Jane, a photo-journalist, has narrowly escaped being blown to bits in Baghdad. She, too makes her way to her uncle’s home. She has left her alcoholic brother, Henry, a year out of re-hab, but still unable to be his own man on his own.Han Hyun-ku's sister-in-law receives them all plus her younger brother, Chae Min-suk, a divorced artist. During the visit, Han Hyun-ku’s unhappy and pregnant daughter dies of kidney failure and Henry commits suicide by stepping in front of a speeding cab. Exhausted by her war-torn life, Jane finds a soul-mate in the artist.They have a one-night stand, from which union, Jane gives birth to a son. Three years later, she returns to Korea with Joony so that he can meet his father, and lives are put back together.We learn from Jane that life’s decisions must be made in split seconds; her motto is that it is wisest to run toward danger, rather than away from it. The indecisive and those who run away do not survive. Jane, her father, her aunt, and her lover are survivors. "Some people are not long for this world," Jane remarks. "The rest of us survive."I will be reading whatever Sonya Chung will be writing.
    • 4/5
      Well written story of a Korean family reconnecting with their past - good character development in a quiet story.
    • 5/5
      There are those of us whose place on this earth is tenuous either because of physical or mental ailments. Modern science can help extend a life, or make life more bearable, but can it stave off the inevitable? What happens to the loved ones left behind? Sonya Chung’s beautifully written debut novel introduces us to the Han family a cast of characters so alive they breathe with each turning of the page. Han Hyun-kyu (part of the Korean-American Hans), the second of three Han brothers, has spent most of his adult life in the United States, but has suddenly and without telling his wife packed a suitcase, left his home and headed back to Korea to spend time with his younger brother, Han Jae-kyu. The reasons for him leaving are illusive and inexplicable to his wife and daughter Ah-jin. Ah-jin is a successful photojournalist just back from Beirut where she lost hearing in one of her ears due to a horrific car bombing. Ah-jin’s life is lived in suitcases going from one assignment to another. Never really laying down roots she’s untethered by relationships and belongings. Her only responsibility has been to care for her brother Han-soo whom she has alternately cared for and intentionally forgotten because Ah-jin has always been the stronger sibling, and he the weaker. Ah-jin travels to the small Korean town to try to figure out why her father left. There we meet the Korean Han’s-the hard working town physician, his dutiful yet distant wife and their pregnant daughter. Both sides of the family struggle to find what it means to be Korean/Korean American in the modern world. Both sides must also come to terms with being “long for this world” when those they love are not.Sonya Chung has written a novel that is at once a page turner yet at the same time one can’t help but slow down the pace in order to revel in the perfectly placed words and phrases.