Description: Yongju is an accomplished student from one of North Korea's most prominent families. Jangmi has had to fend for herself since childhood, most recently by smuggling goods across the border. Danny is a Chinese-American teenager of North Korean descent whose quirks and precocious intelligence have long marked him as an outcast in his California high school. These three disparate lives converge when each of them travels to the region where China borders North Korea-Danny, to visit his mother, who is working as a missionary there, after a humiliating incident keeps him out of school; Yongju, to escape persecution after his father is killed at the hands of the Dear Leader himself; and Jangmi, to protect her unborn child. As they struggle to survive in a place where danger seems to close in on all sides, they come to form a kind of adopted family. But will Yongju, Jangmi, and Danny find their way to the better lives they risked everything for?
Brief description: Krys Lee is the award-winning author of the short-story collection Drifting House. She has been a recipient of the Rome Prize, the Story Prize Spotlight Award, the Honor Title in Adult Fiction Literature from the Asian/Pacific American Libraries Association, and a finalist for the BBC International Story Prize. Her fiction, journalism, and literary translations have appeared in publications such as The Kenyon Review and The Guardian. She is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Yonsei University in South Korea.