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A Novel
by Nancy Jooyoun Kim
1999: The Kim family is struggling to move on after their mother, Sunny, vanished a year ago. Sixty-one-year-old John Kim feels more isolated from his grown children than ever before.
But one evening, their fragile lives are further upended when John finds the body of a stranger in the backyard, carrying a letter to Sunny, leaving the family with more questions than ever.
1977: Sunny is pregnant and has just moved to Los Angeles from Korea with her aloof and often-absent husband. America is not turning out the way she had dreamed it to be, and the loneliness and isolation are 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 but their very lives at risk.
"Kim's second novel is hard to put down, unique, haunting, and beautifully written, as the author slowly weaves layer upon layer in an intricate, mysterious web." —Booklist (starred review)
"What We Kept to Ourselves is an intricately crafted mystery and a heart-wrenching family saga. Nancy Jooyoun Kim writes with a piercing moral clarity, suffusing every page with emotional depth. Fiery, bittersweet and complex, this is a novel of incredible conviction and empathy." —Michelle Min Sterling, New York Times bestselling author of Camp Zero
"What We Kept to Ourselves is both a suspenseful page-turner and a poignant family drama. Kim's beautiful, thoughtful prose illuminates themes of immigration, identity, love, and loss. A gorgeous, thrilling read!" —Jean Kwok, New York Times bestselling author of Girl In Translation
"Bursting with yearning, twists, and secrets, What We Kept to Ourselves is about the difficult questions that die in our throats when it comes to asking our loved ones. A triumph!" —Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face
This information about What We Kept to Ourselves was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nancy Jooyoun Kim is the New York Times bestselling author of What We Kept to Ourselves and The Last Story of Mina Lee, a Reese's Book Club pick. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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