• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2020 November #1
  *Starred Review* Tiller jettisons a typical college semester abroad for what morphs into a nightmare year in several circles of hell when he impulsively casts his lot with magnetic and seemingly magnanimous Pong, a Big Pharma chemist and superfoods entrepreneur. Describing himself as 12-1/2 percent Asian, Tiller comes under Chinese American Pong's spell while golf caddying, and is soon accompanying him as an assistant to China. An innocent abroad and a preternaturally observant and energetically and creatively expressive narrator, Tiller finds himself drawing on heretofore hidden talents to survive bizarre, increasingly menacing situations. These are relayed in extended flashbacks, while, in the present, Lee's cleverly named protagonist navigates a precarious life in a witness-protection program with his depressed older lover and her eight-year-old son, a prodigy chef. Culinary passion, yoga, karaoke, alchemy, immortality, sexual enthrallment, oppression, madness, crime, and diabolical cruelty all stoke Tiller's increasingly surreal and gruesome adventures, which play in dissonant counterpoint to his sweetly harmonious philosophical reflections. Profoundly imaginative and thrillingly virtuosic, Lee (On Such a Full Sea, 2014), has created an audaciously satiric, harrowing, witty, and tender variation on the archetypal hero's journey and a fathoms-deep exploration of self, family, culture, and power. As Tiller steers through maelstroms, with forgiveness, kindness, and love as his polestars, he also makes sure, as does his ill-fated mentor Pong, to savor "a quantum of sweetness."HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Lee is supreme, and this high-velocity, shocking, and wise novel, avidly promoted, is emitting an irresistible magnetic force. Copyright 2020 Booklist Reviews.

Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, as well as 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. Chang-rae Lee teaches writing at Stanford University.