Homeseeking: A GMA Book Club Pick
Books | Fiction / Literary
2.5
Karissa Chen
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK“Homeseeking is about the love of home and family, even against unimaginable circumstances…[A] sweeping epic.” —Good Housekeeping“Fans of historical fiction will want to pick up this exceptional novel immediately.” —Los Angeles TimesFrom WWII to 2008, this deeply moving story follows one couple across sixty years as world events pull them together and apart, illuminating the Chinese diaspora and exploring what it means to find home far from your homeland.Haiwen is buying bananas at a 99 Ranch Market in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, his Suchi, for the first time in sixty years. To recently widowed Haiwen it feels like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back.Suchi was seven when she first met Haiwen in their Shanghai neighborhood, drawn by the sound of his violin. Their childhood friendship blossomed into soul-deep love, but when Haiwen secretly enlisted in the Nationalist army in 1947 to save his brother from the draft, she was left with just his violin and a note: Forgive me.Homeseeking follows the separated lovers through six decades of tumultuous Chinese history as war, famine, and opportunity take them separately to the song halls of Hong Kong, the military encampments of Taiwan, the bustling streets of New York, and sunny California, telling Haiwen’s story from the present to the past while tracing Suchi’s from her childhood to the present, meeting in the crucible of their lives. Throughout, Haiwen holds his memories close while Suchi forces herself to look only forward, neither losing sight of the home they hold in their hearts.At once epic and intimate, Homeseeking is a story of family, sacrifice, and loyalty, and of the power of love to endure beyond distance, beyond time.
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More Details:
Author
Karissa Chen
Pages
512
Publisher
Penguin
Published Date
2025-01-07
ISBN
0593713001 9780593713006
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""But the reality was nothing at all like what she had imagined. Now what she wanted most was impossible. Her family, Haiwen, the comfort of home, all her dreams lay in the past."<br/><br/>Homeseeking explores the way we drift between time—past, present, future, and the haunting space of what could have been. Childhood sweethearts Haiwen and Suchi, bound together like an unbroken ring, are torn apart by war and circumstance. Separated from each other and the families they once knew, they are forced to build lives they never envisioned, all while longing for the world they lost. They wrestle with the choices that shaped their fates, yet life offers no luxury of retracing steps—only the path forward.<br/><br/>Despite the distance between them, I loved the small yet powerful symbols that tethered them together—the violin playing on the radio, the color purple, the ever-present ring. Each one a reminder that they are tethered together for life and will always find one another again.<br/><br/>This book will stick with me just like A Little Life. It was just that good."