Chang-Rae Lee - The Surrendered - Drop-By Signing Only

Lee's masterful fourth novel (after Aloft) bursts with drama and human anguish as it documents the ravages and indelible effects of war. June Han is a starving eleven-year-old refugee fleeing military combat during the Korean War when she is separated from her seven-year-old twin siblings ... the plot rushes forward and back in time, encompassing graphic scenes of suffering, carnage and emotional wreckage. Powerful, deeply felt, compulsively readable and imbued with moral gravity, the novel does not peter out into easy redemption. It's a harrowing tale: bleak, haunting, often heartbreaking -- and not to be missed. In its ineffably quiet way, there really is something Tolstoyan in this searching fiction's determination to understand the characters specifically as members of families and products of other people's influences. The characterizations are astonishingly rich and complex, and the risktaken in depicting the adult June as the woman readers will hope she would not become is triumphantly vindicated. A major achievement, likely to be remembered as one of this year's best books.