The Surrendered

PEN/Hemingway Award-winning, best-selling author Chang-rae Lee delivers a "completely engrossing story of great complexity and tragedy" (Library Journal). At the end of the Korean War, the lives of orphan June Han and American soldier Hector Brennan collide. Thirty years later, they meet again and are forced to come to terms with the secrets of their devastating past.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

…searing…With The Surrendered, Mr. Lee has written the most ambitious and compelling novel of his already impressive career—a symphonic work that reprises the themes of identity, familial legacies and the imperatives of fate he has addressed in earlier works, but which he grapples with here on a broader, more intricate historical canvas. Though the novel has its flaws, it is a gripping and fiercely imagined work that burrows deep into the dark heart of war, leaving us with a choral portrait of the human capacity for both barbarism and transcendence.

A native of Seoul, Korea, Chang-rae Lee emigrated to the U.S. with his parents when he was just three years old, and he's been fascinated with his adopted country ever since. His breakout first novel, Native Speaker, was a critical success on both sides of the Atlantic, and his latest novel, Aloft, continues to explore the American dream. As The New Yorker reflects, "The prose Chang-rae Lee writes is elliptical, riddling, poetic... beautifully made."