Chang-Rae Lee
On Such a Full Sea.
Riverhead Books, 2014. First printing. 9781594486104 352 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6.5" x 9.5", is bound in gray paper spine and white paper-covered boards, with stamped green lettering to spine and publisher's emblem stamped in green on front cover. Book is new. Dust jacket has tiny spot in lower outside corner of front panel and is otherwise like new. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
""On Such a Full Sea" takes Chang-rae Lee’s elegance of prose, his masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new plane. Stepping from the realistic and historical territories of his previous work, Lee brings us into a world created from scratch. Against a vividly imagined future America, Lee tells a stunning, surprising, and riveting story that will change the way readers think about the world they live in.
In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class—descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China—find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement.
In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan’s journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind."