On Such a Full Sea
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.
