Crying in H Mart

Critics Review

• Extraordinary . . . This is a book about loss that is also about love; it’s a book about South Korea that is also about West Coast small town America; it’s a story that is both beautiful and heartbreaking; it is as raw as it is precious. I bawled my eyes out, but I also loved it and I hope you do too.

  Dua Lipa

• Incredible . . . It absolutely wrecked me . . . So, so emotional

  Natalie Portman

• A book you experience with all of your senses: sentences you can taste, paragraphs that sound like music. [Zauner] seamlessly blends stories of food and memory, sumptuousness and grief, to weave a complex narrative of loyalty and loss.

  Rachel Syme

• A gripping, sensuous portrait of an indelible mother-daughter bond that hits all the notes: love, friction, loyalty, grief. All mothers and daughters will recognize themselves – and each other – in these pages.

  Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance

• A wonder: A beautiful, deeply moving coming-of-age story about mothers and daughters, love and grief, food and identity. It blew me away, even as it broke my heart.

  Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me

• The book’s descriptions of jjigae, tteokbokki, and other Korean delicacies stand out as tokens of the deep, all-encompassing love between Zauner and her mother, a love that is charted in vivid descriptions of her mother after death; in a time when people around the world are reckoning with untold loss due to COVID-19, Zauner’s frankness around death feels like an unexpected yet deeply necessary gift.

  Vogue US

• It is [Zauner’s] ability to convey how her mother’s simple offering of a rice snack was actually an act of the truest love that leaves the most indelible impression.

  Refinery 29

• Crying in H Mart is palpable in its grief and its tenderness, reminding us what we all stand to lose.

  Vulture

• Incandescent.

  Electric Lit

• When a loved one dies, we search all of our senses for signs of their presence. Zauner’s ability to let us in through taste makes her book stand out—she makes us feel like we are in her mother’s kitchen, singing her praises.

  Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

• Lyrical . . . Earnest . . . Zauner does a good job capturing the grief of losing a parent with pathos.

  Publishers Weekly

• Zauner brings dish after dish to life on the page in a rich broth of delectable details, cultural context and the personal history often packed into every bite. . . [Crying in H Mart] will ultimately thrill Japanese Breakfast fans and provide comfort to those in the throes of loss while brilliantly detailing the colorful panorama of Korean culture, traditions and — yes — food’

  San Francisco Chronicle

• Crying in H Mart is a warm and wholehearted work of literature, an honest and detailed account of grief over time, studded with moments of hope, humor, beauty, and clear-eyed observation. It is not to be missed.

  Seattle Times

• There’s a beautiful sureness to her narration throughout, but her voice comes alive when she’s describing food: the Korean dishes her mother cooked, learning to make kimchi after her mother’s death, her painful attempts to enjoy a meal out with her father in the midst of their grief. By turns funny, heartbreaking, and self-reflective, this poignant memoir captures all the messy truths of a mother-daughter relationship. Zauner’s musical voice—warm, steady, and brimming over with emotion—will slide straight into listeners’ hearts.

  AudioFile