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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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ON SUCH A FULL SEA

Chang-rae Lee

From the beloved award-winning author of Native Speaker and The Surrendered, this is 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. Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction; A Gesture Life; Aloft; and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Selected by The New Yorker as one of the “20 Writers for the 21st Century,” Chang-rae Lee teaches writing at Princeton University.
Available products
Book

Published 2014-01-07 by Riverhead

Book

Published 2014-01-07 by Riverhead

Comments

Chilling…Lee’s prose is sumptuous and at times discursive, and for that reason, this is a novel that demands the reader’s full engagement. The rewards for that commitment are considerable; On Such a Full Sea is an elegiac and often unsettling glimpse of a future that could be closer than we’d like to think.

It's an engrossing read, and Lee's skills as a world builder of the finest order are evident in every chapter.

Versatility surely earned Lee a place on The New Yorker’s “20 Writers for the 21st Century” dais...That versatility ensures Sea should find equal appreciation among readers who enjoy a heart-thumping adventure—and doctoral students in search of a superlative dissertation text.

Welcome and surprising proof that there’s plenty of life in end-of-the-world storytelling.

UK: Little Brown Korea: Random House

Lee brilliantly and wisely dramatizes class stratification and social disintegration, deprivation and sustenance both physical and psychic, reflecting, with rare acuity, on the evolution of legends and how, in the most hellish of circumstances, we rediscover the solace of art.

Watching a talented writer take a risk is one of the pleasures of devoted reading, and “On Such a Full Sea” provides all that and more. It’s a wonderful addition not only to Chang-rae Lee’s body of work but to the ranks of serious writers venturing into the realm of dystopian fantasy….Marvelous…a timeless exploration of the human condition.