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Title: Long for This World

Subtitle: A Novel

Author: Sonya Chung

Narrator: Hillary Huber

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-18-10

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

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.

Critic Reviews:

An intricately structured and powerfully resonant portrait of lives lived at the crossroads of culture, and a family torn between the old world and the new. (Kate Walbert, National Book Award finalist and author of A Short History of Women)

Members Reviews:

Thought Provoking and Entertaining

Long for This World is bold and subtle, thought-provoking and entertaining. Page after page is filled with writing that made me think: Aha! I know that feeling, but could not articulate it (at all, let alone as beautifully), revealing the many layers that can course through a single moment.

The story of the Korean American Han's and the Korean Han's covers a panoramic distance across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Yet the story is not sprawling, it is deep and intimate, filled with the thoughts and feelings of an array of distinct and beautifully rendered characters.

Although the main character Ah Jin (Jane) is a war photographer, and there are vivid scenes that take the reader into the war zone, the most dangerous moments in the story seem to occur during ordinary interactions; between a daughter and her mother, a sister and her brother, a husband and a wife. Much of the story takes place in a small town in Korea inland from the ocean, where "...there is little that happens here in the country, and yet the air moves, it is dynamic, taste and texture and life happen in the breeze." Although a lot happens in this story, we also get to experience what happens "in the breeze." Just like a stop-motion movie that shows a field of flowers blossom in the springtime, we get to see the inner shifts and changes inside the characters, the story takes us places we can't ordinarily go in real life.

Even minor characters are rendered with finesse. Dr. Lee, as Jane calls her mother, is a remote woman, who (ironically) is more devoted to her psychiatric career than to her family. Jane is not close to her mother, yet she tries to imagine what her mother's life was like when she grew up. She imagines that Dr. Lee's mother was probably a woman chasing after social status and romantic affairs, disregarding her child, who later takes on the same self-absorbed traits.