Homeseeking: A GMA Book Club Pick
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4.3 • 31 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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 Times
From 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Karissa Chen’s dazzling debut novel weaves together six decades of Chinese history with the tender, tumultuous lives of two childhood sweethearts. After meeting as children in 1930s Japanese-occupied Shanghai, Haiwen and Suchi are separated by war, only to unexpectedly reconnect a lifetime later in 2008 Los Angeles. In the time in between, their paths span Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States, shaped all the while by love, betrayal, and sacrifice. Using alternating timelines, Chen captures both the grand sweep of history and the intimate moments that define each of us. Haiwen’s enlistment in the Nationalist army and Suchi’s flight to Hong Kong set them on diverging courses, yet their connection endures across decades and continents. Chen’s prose vividly portrays the brutal sacrifices of migration, and her meticulous historical detail immerses you in each setting across this sweeping tale. Blending epic scope and emotional intimacy, Homeseeking is a poignant meditation on love, identity, and the enduring ties that bind us to home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sweeping and heart-rending debut, Chen brings to life more than 60 years of Chinese history through the tale of childhood sweethearts separated by war and reunited decades later in America. Haiwen, a recent widower, and Suchi, who helps raise her grandkids, cross paths while shopping in 2008 Los Angeles. The two first met as kindergartners in 1930s Shanghai and fell in love as teenagers but were separated by the war between Mao's Communists and Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalists. In the historical timeline, Haiwen enlists in the Nationalist army in a misguided effort to help his family, a decision that will tragically reverberate through succeeding generations. Suchi, meanwhile, is sent to Hong Kong with her older sister to escape the war. At times, Chen relies too much on expositional dialogue to capture historical nuances, such as mainlander suppression of native Taiwanese culture, but in tracing Haiwen's and Suchi's diverging paths, she conveys the breadth of their sacrifices, making their eventual reunion all the more poignant. As she writes about Suchi's realizations: "Home wasn't a place.... It was people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, of places long disappeared." For the most part, Chen scales the heights of her ambition.
