The New York Times bestselling author of the "timely, important"
(PopSugar) The Last Story of Mina Lee returns with a propulsive
and suspenseful new novel about a family that unravels when a
stranger--who may hold the key to their missing mother--is found dead in
their backyard.
1999: The Kim family is struggling to move on with their lives after
their mother, Sunny, vanished a year ago. Sixty-one-year-old John Kim
feels more isolated from his grown children, Anastasia and Ronald, than
ever before. But one evening, their fragile lives are further upended
when John discovers the body of a dead stranger in the backyard. The
tragedy seems random until it's revealed that the dead man was carrying
a letter to Sunny, sparking a desperate investigation into the
stranger's history and possible connections to Sunny--only to discover
that someone has been watching them.
1977: Sunny is pregnant and has just moved to Los Angeles from Korea
with her work-obsessed husband. America is not turning out the way she
had dreamed it to be, and the loneliness and isolation is broken only by
a fateful encounter at a bus stop. The unexpected connection spans the
decades and echoes into the family's lives in the present as they
uncover devastating secrets that put not only everything they thought
they knew about their mother at risk, but their very lives as well.
Both a riveting page-turner and moving family story, What We Kept to
Ourselves masterfully explores the consequences of secrets between
parents and children, husbands and wives, the search for home when all
seems lost, and what it means to dream in America.
