A Tender Age - by Chang-Rae Lee (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee?"--The Los Angeles Times

"He has redefined not only what it means to be American, but the fabric of the Great American Novel itself." --Jhumpa Lahiri

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a story of guilt, innocence, and a boy on the cusp of adolescence.

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.

Review Quotes

Praise for Chang-rae Lee

"I have no choice but to ask: Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee?"--The Los Angeles Times

"Nothing is rushed; nothing is overlooked... Lee understands that in art and in stories what is perhaps most valuable is not what can be explained but what can be felt." -The Boston Globe

"The prose Chang-rae Lee writes is elliptical, riddling, poetic...beautifully made." --The New Yorker

"[Chang-rae Lee] explores the fundamental human desires to be seen and to love." --The Washington Post

"Lee's writing style, as usual, is alive with wit and satiric social commentary... boisterous and fun." --NPR, Fresh Air

About the Author

Chang-rae Lee is the author of six other novels, including Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, 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.