Homeseeking

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What to expect

'A layered, beautifully written, and deeply moving novel. Karissa Chen masterfully blends love, music, history, and heartbreak to create a sweeping tale that spans decades and continents'
Abi Daré

'[Homeseeking] weaves expertly between present and past, telling the story of childhood sweethearts who meet again late in life and are torn between looking back and moving on'
Celeste Ng

'As I tearfully turned the last page of Homeseeking, I knew that it had earned a place on my top shelf . . . unforgettable'
Washington Post

'Mesmerising . . . its portrayal of ruptured lives is heartrending'
Harper's Bazaar

Suchi first sees Haiwen in their Shanghai neighbourhood when she is seven years old, drawn by the sound of his violin. Their childhood friendship blossoms into love, but when Haiwen secretly enlists in the Nationalist army in 1947 to save his brother from the draft, Suchi is left with just his violin and a note: Forgive Me.


Sixty years later, recently widowed Haiwen spots Suchi at a grocery store in Los Angeles. It feels to Haiwen like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back. In the twilight of their lives, can they reclaim their past and the love they lost?


Homeseeking follows the separated lovers through six decades of tumultuous Chinese history, telling Haiwen's story from the present to the past while tracing Suchi's from her childhood to the present, meeting at the crucible of their lives. From Shanghai to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States, neither loses sight of the home they hold in their hearts.


'A love story in more ways than one, Homeseeking is a beautiful, nuanced look at Chinese history, family, young love, and the wisdom of age'
Vanessa Chan

Critics Review

A towering achievement in storytelling . . . an impactful love story, told against the backdrop of historical events . . . one of the best debut novels of this century.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Sweeping, epic, yet deeply intimate, Homeseeking traces a pair of first loves and the gossamer thread that binds them across six decades and four nations as the world splits them apart, again and again. A spellbinding meditation on family, immigration, and the many faces of courage in times of hardship, this is a dazzling debut.
Kirstin Chen, New York Times bestselling author of Counterfeit
Masterful and ambitious . . . mesmerising in its balance between global events and intimate suffering, and its portrayal of ruptured lives is heartrending
Harper's Bazaar
Skilfully interweaves the personal and the political to produce a kaleidoscopic and affecting work
Guardian
An absolute stunner of a debut. Chen nimbly tackles too often overlooked history in an exploration of surviving the trauma of war and loss of home. Homeseeking is a novel that asks if those who survive by moving forward and those who sustain by looking back can ever truly meet.
Erika Swyler, author of The Book of Speculation
A love story in more ways than one, Homeseeking is a beautiful, nuanced look at Chinese history, family, young love, and the wisdom of age. As Suchi and Haiwen do their best to survive their lives, we follow them across the circumstances and choices that continually separate them, and bring them back together - even as their worlds keep changing. By the end I was in tears. Remarkable
Vanessa Chan, author of The Storm We Made
Karissa Chen's debut novel weaves expertly between present and past, telling the story of childhood sweethearts who meet again late in life and are torn between looking back and moving on. A kaleidoscopic yet intimate view of the Chinese diaspora, Homeseeking explores how identities flex and transform during war-and which fundamental parts of us remain the same no matter where we find ourselves.
Celeste Ng, author of Our Missing Hearts
Homeseeking is a perfect love song, beautiful and poignant and tender and sad. A tour de force of storytelling and a book with real faith in the human heart, with all its immense capacity for both love and hatred. Read it. It will make time stand still. Karissa Chen is the writer we've been waiting for, and Homeseeking is a must read
Matthew Salesses, author of The Sense of Wonder
Through its glittering and heartrending depictions of war, forced movement, broken love stories, and the tumultuous Chinese-Taiwanese 20th century, this spellbinding debut ingeniously captures the paradox of the immigrant experience: doggedly looking forward while uncontrollably looking back.
Juliet Grames, author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna
Epic, assured, and beautifully drawn, Homeseeking is a love story that reveals the effects of war and history on the lives of individuals. Karissa Chen has created a world that's deeply absorbing, following Suchi and Haiwen across decades, borders, and lifetimes
Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers
This epic novel is both the sweeping story of one country's fraught history and an intimate look at a couple's enduring bond
Real Simple
In Homeseeking, Karissa Chen brings a rare delicacy to the pain of history, exploring what it means for generations to be simultaneously imprisoned by and separated from the past. Her characters linger with desperate vividness in each other's memories - as they long will in her readers' imaginations
Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian
Karissa Chen is a brilliant and patient storyteller, weaving the entwined histories of two unforgettable characters separated and reunited across time and distance in this tender, riveting novel. Chen's lush descriptions and rich historical details offer much for readers to see and hear and imagine as we follow Suchi and Haiwen from their Shanghai neighborhood to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Los Angeles. A sweeping, poignant work of history, memory, and survival, Homeseeking is an enduring love story and a debut to treasure
Nicole Chung, author of A Living Remedy
A tender and captivating story about fate and loss, hope and love, expertly intertwined with modern Chinese history. Uniquely told through two lovers whose perspectives begin at opposite ends of their timelines, Karissa Chen's beautiful debut will take your heart on a journey!
Eve J. Chung, author of Daughters of Shandong
Homeseeking is a layered, beautifully written, and deeply moving novel. Karissa Chen masterfully blends love, music, history, and heartbreak to create a sweeping tale that spans decades and continents. The novel captures the resilience of the human spirit and the bittersweet reality of the immigrant experience. It's more than just a love story; it's a profound reflection on the impact of history, migration, and identity - one that explores the tension between holding on to the past and embracing the future, revealing both the pain and grace of finding where we truly belong
Abi Daré, author of the Girl with the Louding Voice
Wonderfully cinematic, gorgeously orchestrated . . . like any tried-and-true epic (think Pachinko or The Joy Luck Club) . . . Homeseeking is just a genuine pleasure to read.
San Francisco Chronicle
[A] poignant debut . . . through her characters' ranging sensibilities, Chen examines the psychological aftershocks of war . . . history and fate, displacement and separation. These are grand topics, but through Suchi and Haiwen's quests for belonging amid insurmountable conflict, Homeseeking captures the enduring and unexpected ways these larger forces impact individual lives.
New York Times Book Review
While Karissa Chen's sweeping epic, Homeseeking, centers on war, love and family, more than anything it's about the immigrant's phantom limb - the longing for home and for the lives and loves left behind . . . The ambition and scope of Homeseeking are impressive enough before considering Chen's craft and execution. It is impossible not to marvel at the many strands she has woven into this beating heart of a novel . . . It is rare that a 500-page book delivers on its weight, and even rarer that a book I'm asked to review becomes an all-time favorite. But as I tearfully turned the last page of Homeseeking, I knew that it had earned a place on my top shelf. For Chen has finally put into words the lifelong grief I have carried as an immigrant - grief for a childhood, a place, a home that no longer exist . . . Just as I did, many readers are bound to find their home within the pages of Chen's unforgettable debut.
Washington Post
The epic sweep of Karissa Chen's debut, Homeseeking, spans borders, oceans, decades, and wars to unfurl the tale of Suchi and Haiwen, childhood sweethearts whose fates are bound together from their time as neighbors in Japan-occupied Shanghai. Vivid historical detail brings alive the settings, from 1960s Hong Kong to 1970s Taiwan to 1980s New York, and finally, to late-2000s Los Angeles - where the now elders reconnect to see if they can overcome their past traumas. Pachinko-like in scope, it too illustrates how individual lives, here of the Chinese diaspora, are buffeted by history and geopolitics, and that the ensuing pain and loss can be borne across a lifetime
Vogue
An epic and intimate tale of one couple across sixty years as the world pulls them together and apart. Following two separated lovers through six decades of tumultuous Chinese history, Homeseeking is a detailed portrait of the Chinese diaspora and the power of love and loyalty against all odds
Chicago Review of Books

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