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A Tender Age
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$32.00
Published on Aug 11, 2026 | 384 Pages
From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a story of guilt, innocence, and a boy on the cusp of adolescence
“A tour de force… One of contemporary American literature’s major chroniclers of manhood.” —The Atlantic
“[A] knockout… Lee reinvents himself with each book.” —The Boston Globe
“Moving… a classic bildungsroman.” —The New York Times Book Review
“He has redefined not only what it means to be American, but the fabric of the Great American Novel itself.” —Jhumpa Lahiri
A spellbinding exploration of American masculinity and family dynamics as seen through the confused eyes of a prepubescent child of immigrants, A Tender Age joins the rich tradition of the American bildungsroman. The natural descendent of characters like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caufield, Korean-American Jeon-Gi is torn between competing ideas of himself. At home, his working-class parents dote on him. Outside, he is part of a roving pack of kids with dominion over a derelict baseball field, weedy parking lot, and rusty jungle gym. Getting into and out of trouble is all-consuming. But the summer he turns eleven, he becomes embroiled in a staggering series of events reverberating far beyond himself and his family.
Devastating in its emotional precision, A Tender Age captures a family and community in striking distance of the American dream, and a young person on the precipice of adult knowledge, looking at his own culpability and looking away—then thinking about it for the rest of his life.
“A tour de force… One of contemporary American literature’s major chroniclers of manhood.” —The Atlantic
“[A] knockout… Lee reinvents himself with each book.” —The Boston Globe
“Moving… a classic bildungsroman.” —The New York Times Book Review
“He has redefined not only what it means to be American, but the fabric of the Great American Novel itself.” —Jhumpa Lahiri
A spellbinding exploration of American masculinity and family dynamics as seen through the confused eyes of a prepubescent child of immigrants, A Tender Age joins the rich tradition of the American bildungsroman. The natural descendent of characters like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caufield, Korean-American Jeon-Gi is torn between competing ideas of himself. At home, his working-class parents dote on him. Outside, he is part of a roving pack of kids with dominion over a derelict baseball field, weedy parking lot, and rusty jungle gym. Getting into and out of trouble is all-consuming. But the summer he turns eleven, he becomes embroiled in a staggering series of events reverberating far beyond himself and his family.
Devastating in its emotional precision, A Tender Age captures a family and community in striking distance of the American dream, and a young person on the precipice of adult knowledge, looking at his own culpability and looking away—then thinking about it for the rest of his life.
Author
Chang-rae Lee
Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, as well as My Year Abroad, On Such a Full Sea, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A 2021 winner of the Award of Merit for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Chang-rae Lee teaches writing at Stanford University.
Learn More about Chang-rae Lee
