In this masterful novel of inheritance and loss Sonya Chung (Long for This World) proves herself a worthy heir to Marguerite Duras Hwang Sun-won and James Salter. Spanning generations and divergent cultures The Loved Ones maps the intimate politics of unlikely attractions illicit love and costly reconciliations.
Charles Lee the young African American patriarch of a biracial family seeks to remedy his fatherless childhood in Washington DC by making an honorable choice when his chance arrives. Years later in the mid-1980s uneasy and stymied in his marriage to Alice he finds a connection with Hannah Lee the teenage Korean American caregiver whose parents' transgressive flight from tradition and war has left them shrouded in a cloud of secrets and muted passion.
A shocking and senseless death will test every familial bond and force all who are touched by the tragedy to reexamine who their loved ones truly are-the very meaning of the words. Haunting elliptical and powerful The Loved Ones deconstructs the world we think we know and shows us the one we inhabit.
Read the interview with Sonya Chung on Electric Literature: https://electricliterature.com/sonya-chung-on-race-risk-reinvention-885d77c90633#.gwusewgq6
Sonya Chung is the author of the novels The Loved Ones (Relegation Books, 2016) and Long for This World (Scribner, 2010). She is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination, the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the Bronx Council on the Arts Writers’ Residency, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Key West Literary Seminars residency, a Studios of Key West residency, and an Escape to Create residency. Sonya’s stories, reviews, & essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Tin House, The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, Short: An International Anthology, and This is The Place: Women Writing About Home, among others. Sonya has taught fiction writing at Columbia University, Skidmore College, NYU, Warren Wilson’s MFA program, and Gotham Writers’ Workshop. Currently she lives in New York City, where she is Director and a programmer at a nonprofit arthouse cinema.
“Sonya Chung's stunning second novel The Loved Ones charts the unexpected ways in which families form, fracture, and rebuild…The Loved Ones renders anguish with devastating precision — through the quiet confidence and grace of Chung's poetic prose. There's a heartfelt, heartbreaking purity to this novel unlike anything I've encountered in a long time. Read it, revel in it, and then go hold your loved ones tight”. —Lincoln Thompson, Buzzfeed Books
“I read The Loved Ones with breathless urgency. It was as expansive as I needed it it to be while also telling the most personal of family stories. Much missing American immigration and great migration history was missing for me before this beautiful story helped piece it together. From the first page this novel is brimming with prismatic, intersectional moments I was not aware of between Korean and black Americans in the post war era. The intergenerational aspect just helps the pages race by as generations carry each other’s burdens and triumphs through the years. Fans of Homegoing and White Teeth will feel this novel is a blessing on their nightstands.” —Hannah Depp, Loyalty Bookstores
"Sonya Chung's prose is elegant sparse and heartbreaking in a way that reminds one of Elena Ferrante or Clarice Lispector. In this novel of two very different but interconnected families both named Lee she tells the story of love against the twin inheritances of shame and grief. This book is a complication of the immigrant narrative in a way that is long overdue and necessary. A gorgeous and important second novel."--Nayomi Munaweera, author of What Lies Between Us
"Sonya Chung's new novel The Loved Ones spans generations and cultures to capture what it means to be a lost child in a lonely world. In compelling prose Chung lays bare the devastating effects of tragedy on family-then boldly suggests the power to heal lies beyond our loved ones. Shattering assumptions about loss and longing this shimmering tale of dangerous love will break your heart and mend it too."---Bridgett M. Davis, author of Into the Go-Slow
"Within a multigenerational saga about family race and difference The Loved Ones unfurls an elegant love story about two people bound to one another through tragedy yet kept apart by time and circumstance. The pages of this gorgeous novel gave me insight upon insight characters I grew to love and the most satisfying ending I've read in a very long time."--Shannon Cain, author of The Necessity of Certain Behaviors winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize
"The story of Charles and Alice their children Veda and Benny and their babysitter Hannah and her parents pushes boundaries. Chung (Long for This World 2010) takes us from 1951 to 2005 and from Washington D.C. to Korea and Paris drastically reframing our world by exploring difficult ideas and raising awareness of our capacity for empathy. In achieving this she joins in the best tradition of world literature. Part immigrant narrative part coming-of-age fiction with interwoven themes of interracial marriage the role of absentee fathers and the continued hold of the past this tale charts a nuanced journey that follows no convenient tropes. This is particularly striking in the story of Hannah's Korean immigrant parents Chong-ho and Soon-mi. In a book full of complex characters and plot twists the sparse and elegant prose creates a quietness that allows contemplation of one of life's big questions What is love? Chung's adeptness in capturing the soaring drama of subdued interactions makes this worth a read. But it is her ability to be at once subversive and optimistic radical and reassuring that makes this a must-read." -Shoba Viswanathan, Booklist
"A gorgeous multigenerational saga of love and race loss and belonging Chung's (Long for This World 2010) latest follows the intertwining lives of two very different families in Washington D.C.
"Charles Frederick Douglass Lee, the young African-American patriarch of his biracial family… is doing for his family what his own father couldn't or wouldn't. As a young soldier stationed in Korea, Charles met Alice fresh out of the Peace Corps and avoiding medical school at home. Alice got pregnant, Charles proposed, determined to "put his head down do right and make a family." And so they have built a life together stable if not easy. Then Alice returns to work after years at home and the family… hires Hannah Lee, the stoic 13-year-old daughter of Korean immigrants, to look after the kids… Quietly expansive, the novel moves between the stories of the two families alternating glimpses of the past with the present: Hannah's parents' forbidden courtship in Korea and a doomed family trip back to the Hadong countryside 10 years later; Alice's early adulthood and the night she met Charles. Every last one of Chung's characters is wholly alive and breathtakingly human but it's her portrait of teenage Hannah-always complicated never romanticized-that makes the novel such a heart-wrenching pleasure.
"Elegant and empathetic a book impossible to put down." -Kirkus Reviews Sept. 1st 2016
