From the beloved award-winning author of Native
Speaker and The Surrendered, a highly
provocative, deeply affecting story of one woman’s legendary
quest in a shocking, future America.
On Such
a Full Sea takes Chang-rae Lee’s elegance of prose, his
masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in
identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new
plane. Stepping from the realistic and historical
territories of his previous work, Lee brings us into a world
created from scratch. Against a vividly imagined future
America, Lee tells a stunning, surprising, and riveting
story that will change the way readers think about the world
they live in.
In a future, long-declining America,
society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned
urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled,
self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor
class—descendants of those brought over en masse many years
earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China—find
purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine
produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter
villages that ring the labor settlement.
In this
world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her
home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when
the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan’s journey to
find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the
anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant
governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in
a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind.