Jung Yun – All the World Can Hold

It is Sunday, Sept. 16, 2001. The Sunday after 9/11. Five days after the Tuesday when hijacked planes are flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in DC, and a field in Pennsylvania. As searchers still comb through smoldering wreckage, a cruise ship that should have left from New York’s Passenger Ship Terminal in Manhattan instead sets off from Boston for a cruise to Bermuda. Aboard are more than 600 passengers, and in Jung Yun’s new novel, All the World Can Hold, we follow three passengers in particular. Three who, as they travel on this voyage that is anything but mundane, undergo experiences that will leave them never the same again.

Jung Yun joins host William Miller to talk about the origins of the novel, her writing of it, her own insights into the characters, and how the book is different from yet similar to her previous two novels.

Jung Yun was born in Seoul, Korea, and grew up in Fargo, North Dakota. Prior to All the World Can Hold, she published Shelter (2016) a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Great New Writers Award and also long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First-Novel Prize; and O Beautiful (2021), a New York Times Editor’s Choice book as well as a Times Group Read book, and a San

Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year choice. Currently, Jung Yun lives in Maryland and teaches in the George Washington University creative writing program.

Key Takeaways

1. Turning personal history into fiction

Author Jung Yun discusses how her novel All the World Can Hold was inspired by her own experience taking a cruise shortly after the September 11 attacks. Rather than focusing directly on the tragedy, the novel explores how ordinary people process and move forward after a world-altering event.

2. A cruise ship as a literary “crucible”

The story follows three strangers whose lives intersect aboard a cruise ship headed to Bermuda. By placing characters in an enclosed environment where they cannot escape their pasts or their choices, Yun builds tension and explores how people confront regret, ambition, and unresolved relationships.

3. Characters shaped by their own flaws and decisions

Yun explains her fascination with flawed characters who carry the seeds of their own undoing. Across her novels—from Shelter to O Beautiful—she often writes about disasters people create for themselves and how those pressures reveal their deepest motivations.

4. Writing about disasters—personal and societal

A recurring theme in Yun’s work is how individuals react when systems or circumstances collapse, whether it’s the housing crisis, an oil boom, or national trauma. Her stories focus less on the event itself and more on the human responses that follow.

“I’m always writing about disaster… the disasters we create for ourselves and how people respond when you put them into these pressurized situations.” - Jung Yun

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Learn more about Jung Yun and her books here.

Purchase a copy of All the World Can Hold or any of Jung's other books here.

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