Forgotten Country

'A richly emotional portrait of a family that had me spellbound from page one' Cheryl Strayed, bestselling author of Wild

The night before Janie's sister, Hannah, is born, her grandmother tells her a story: Since the Japanese occupation of Korea, their family has lost a daughter in every generation, and Janie is told to keep Hannah safe.

Years later, when Hannah cuts all ties and disappears, Janie goes to find her. It is the start of a journey that will force her to confront her family's painful silence, the truth behind her parents' sudden move to America twenty years earlier, and her own conflicted feelings toward Hannah.

Weaving Korean folklore with a modern narrative of immigration and identity, FORGOTTEN COUNTRY is a gripping story of a family struggling to find its way out of silence and back to one another.

“In Forgotten Country , Catherine Chung tells an inexpressibly beautiful story about a Korean family with a complex history... The story builds quietly, meticulously, and Chung does a masterful job of weaving the past with the present, incorporating mythology and memory in ways that both captivate and haunt. If you read one novel this spring, let it be Forgotten Country”

In Forgotten Country, Catherine Chung tells an inexpressibly beautiful story about a Korean family with a complex history... The story builds quietly, meticulously, and Chung does a masterful job of weaving the past with the present, incorporating mythology and memory in ways that both captivate and haunt. If you read one novel this spring, let it be Forgotten Country - Roxane Gay, at The Rumpus

Luminous and surprising.... Chung brings a gentle, special gravity to this Korean family's tale of endurance... Her voice is fresh, her material rich, and Forgotten Country is an impressive, memorable debut - San Francisco Chronicle

In her gorgeous debut, Chung offers a heartbreaking story about sisters, family, and keeping traditions alive - People magazine

Chung indelibly portays a Korea viciously divided, but ever bound to history, myth, and hope - O, The Oprah Magazine

[An]... unflinchingly honest examination of grief, anger, familial obligation, and love - The New Yorker

Heartbreaking and redemptive - Boston Globe

A] beautiful debut novel...woven with tender reflections, sharp renderings of isolation, and beautiful prose....Chung simultaneously shines light on the violence of Korean history, the chill of American xenophobia, and the impossibility of home in either country - Publishers Weekly, starred review

Catherine Chung is the author of The Tenth Muse and Forgotten Country, for which she won an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. She has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a Granta New Voice and a Director's Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and was the recipient of a Dorthy Sargent Rosenberg Prize in poetry. She has a degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and worked at a think tank in Santa Monica before receiving her MFA from Cornell University. She has published work in the New York Times and Granta, and is a fiction editor at Guernica Magazine. She lives in New York City.

'A richly emotional portrait of a family that had me spellbound from page one' Cheryl Strayed, bestselling author of Wild The night before Janie's sister, Hannah, is born, her grandmother tells her a story: Since the Japanese occupation of Korea, their family has lost a daughter in every generation, and Janie is told to keep Hannah safe. Years later, when Hannah cuts all ties and disappears, Janie goes to find her. It is the start of a journey that will force her to confront her family's painful silence, the truth behind her parents' sudden move to America twenty years earlier, and her own conflicted feelings toward Hannah.Weaving Korean folklore with a modern narrative of immigration and identity, FORGOTTEN COUNTRY is a gripping story of a family struggling to find its way out of silence and back to one another.

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