Praise for My Year Abroad:
“My Year Abroad is an extraordinary book, acrobatic on the level of the sentence, symphonic across its many movements—and this is a book that moves…My Year Abroad is a wild ride—a caper, a romance, a bildungsroman, and something of a satire of how to get filthy rich in rising Asia. This isn’t a book that skates through its many disparate-seeming scenes, but rather unites them in the heartfelt adventure of its protagonist, who begins his year “abroad” as a foreign land to himself and arrives at something like belonging by the end of his story.” – Vogue.com
“A syncopated surprise, with an ending that will be sure to leave you texting all your friends.” – NYMag.com/Vulture
“Chang-rae Lee’s electric new novel has the kind of kinetic energy that makes reading it feel like a full body experience, leaving you wondering and in awe of where exactly it will take you next… a virtuosic, wildly original book — one that cements Lee’s status as one of the most exciting writers working today.” – Refinery29
“By turns dark, humorous and almost sneakily insightful.” – GoodHousekeeping.com
“Dickens meets globalism in this new work from one of our most celebrated writers.” – OprahMag.com
A syncopated surprise, with an ending that will be sure to leave you texting all your friends.” –Vulture
“My Year Abroad is a strange and stirring amalgam: a tender novel about business, ambition, and appetite. With great generosity, and in a searching, democratic spirit, Chang-rae Lee describes the enticements, mirages, pleasures and catastrophes that attend not only the pursuit of wealth but the pursuit of happiness in all its forms, romantic, domestic, and, yes, gustatory. In Pong Lou, he has given American literature a character who deserves his place among other tragic dreamers, from Gatsby to J.R.” —Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Middlesex
“For a quarter century now, from book to book, [Chang-rae Lee] has explored the ever-urgent themes of alienation, assimilation, and identity with unmatched assurance and acuity. He has redefined not only what it means to be American, but the fabric of the Great American Novel itself.”—Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Interpreter of Maladies
“My Year Abroad is a novel of astonishing wit and wisdom and scope, a globe-spanning story about those powerful first youthful encounters with love and evil and heartbreak and beauty. It’s also, by the way, enormously fun to read. Chang-rae Lee is, clearly, a master.”—Nathan Hill, New York Times-bestselling author of The Nix
“Lee is supreme, and this high-velocity, shocking, and wise novel, avidly promoted, is emitting an irresistible magnetic force.” —Booklist, STARRED review
“Lee is masterful from passage to passage. . .A sage study in how readily we’re undone by our appetites.”—Kirkus Reviews
“This literary whirlwind has Lee running on all cylinders.”—Publishers Weekly, STARRED review
