Sublimation

A take on the classic immigrant story . . . I can relate

Ruth Ozeki, Women's Prize-winning author of The Book of Form and Emptiness

In this dazzling parable of connection and isolation, Isabel J. Kim's vividly crafted characters navigate identity, belonging, and the weight of a divided history. A richly imagined alternate reality that serves as a perfect allegory for our own world, where the borders of our fragmented selves are increasingly shaped and policed by corporate technologies.

Scott Westerfeld, author of Uglies and The Mortons

Sublimation is an odyssey of choices and regrets, of people who would be and never were but also are, all at once, exploring immigration and separation, diaspora and the resulting split identities of cultural interweaving — both willing and unwilling. Kim masterfully blends the experimental and straightforward, jarring yet familiar, philosophical and theoretical, while examining placelessness and fractured identity through multilayered narratives. I have never felt more seen by a book in my life

Ai Jiang, author of A Palace Near the Wind

Sublimation is modern science fiction at its best and most relevant, articulating a metaphor that speaks to one of our world’s greatest and most ubiquitous crises—the border—with the terrible precision of open-heart surgery

Vajra Chandrasekera, Nebula Award-winning author of The Saint of Bright Doors

A heartrending and mind-bending novel about our slippery sense of identity and desire – essential reading for understanding today's reality.

Stephanie Feldman, author of Saturnalia

Beyond candescent . . . after Sublimation, the immigrant story will never be the same. Kim is a nerve-wracker and a heart-render, a Seoul-lighter and a world-raveler; she also happens to be one of the finest writers working today. The tigers are smoking again — read about it here first

Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Sublimation is an unsettling and suspenseful narrative about the borders that cross us and the selves we subsequently leave behind

Anton Hur, author of Toward Eternity

Isabel J. Kim is the most exciting new voice to hit speculative fiction in years. In a world desperately in need of new narratives around immigration and identity, Sublimation is the big bold brilliant book we have been waiting for

Sam J. Miller, bestselling author of Blackfish City

Sublimation is one of the most powerful debut novels I've ever had the pleasure to read. It began blowing my mind from the first page as it explores self and the way memory and experience shapes us. Becoming an instance is like quantum mechanics in human form

Mary Robinette Kowal, bestselling author of The Spare Man

Sublimation delivers doubly on its knockout premise, combining a compulsive page-turner with a keen meditation on fractured selves and the opacity of desire. Tremendous

Scott Alexander Howard, author of The Other Valley

Kim's un-put-downable debut imagines a world where migration literary splits immigrants in two, leaving one self in their country of origin while the other moves to their new home. When the Soyoung Rose Kang who has lived in the U.S since age 10 returns to Korea for her grandfather's funeral, she comes face-to-face with the iteration of herself who stayed behind. This fresh and fascinating conceit gives rise to a taut plot and an incisive exploration of identity and assimilation

Publishers Weekly