Description
The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko returns with a breathtaking contemporary epic: a masterpiece by turns sweeping and intimate, that reckons with ambition and moderation, lust and loyalty, personal dreams and familial duty.
Min Jin Lee brings grand ambition, fierce heart, and the tenderest hope to a novel I didn't want to end.” ―Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger
In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children―Bo, DH, and Mido―find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California―where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security.
In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, wh
“A gripping real-life horror story of dementia, love and grief. . . . Kolker displays his genius for the immersive detail.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Robert Kolker's new book is at once a tragedy, a mystery and a testament to a family's love.” —NPR
"With his breathtaking chronicle of a family with a rare form of dementia, Robert Kolker claims his title as the Ann Patchett of nonfiction family dramas." —BookPage (starred review)
In the idyllic American town of Pleasant Hills, Pennsylvania, there lived a family with nine siblings, the youngest a girl named Barb. As the older children headed off to college and started their lives, only Barb was home to see their beautiful, still-young mother fall under a gothic spell, changing into someone she didn’t recognize: withdrawn, neglectful, uncaring. Thus begins The Vanishing Family, journalist Robert Kolker’s heartbreaking follow-up to his beloved Hidden Valley Road. This family, we learn, has a genetic mutation that causes dementia, but with an especially cruel twist. As early as their forties, formerly loving parents and hard-driving executives will lose their jobs, have affairs, take up drinking—shed all inhibitions and sense of responsibility—and become people their families hardly know. Their former personalities seem to vanish—and there is a fifty-fifty chance that it will happen to their children, too.
The Vanishing Family unfolds with dramatic intensity as the siblings begin to realize that what happened to their mother is happening to them: first one, then two, three, four, and more begin to change. Sue, in search of a calling, finds her place in caring for the others. Barb sets out to find a cure. Alongside their story, Kolker weaves in the dramatic scientific fight against dementia; after decades of blind alleys, this family’s rare form of FTD (frontotemporal dementia) might lead to a breakthrough in the prevention and treatment of all dementia—including the scourge of Alzheimer’s disease. Moving, intimate, unexpectedly hopeful, The Vanishing Family is an enthralling narrative about one family’s fate, and a medical detective story that speaks to all of us who fear losing ourselves at the end.
ere the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice―for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers―is a kind of prayer.
An immersive, engrossing novel ... this is panorama told in brilliant detail.”―Colm Tóibín, bestselling author ofLong IslandandBrooklyn