"Watching a talented writer take a risk is one of the pleasures of
devoted reading, and On Such a Full Sea provides all that and more. .
. . With On Such a Full Sea, [Chang-rae Lee] has found a new way to
explore his old preoccupation: the oft-told tale of the desperate,
betraying, lonely human heart."--Andrew Sean Greer, The New York Times
Book Review
"I've never been a fan of grand hyperbolic declarations in book reviews,
but faced with On Such a Full Sea, I have no choice but to ask: Who is
a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee today?"--Porochista Khakpour, The
Los Angeles Times
From the beloved award-winning author of Native Speaker, The
Surrendered, and My Year Abroad, a highly provocative, deeply
affecting story of one woman's legendary quest in a shocking, future
America.
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 neighborhoods have been repurposed as
highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor
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 labor 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.
