What We Kept to Ourselves: A Novel

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The New York Times bestselling author of the Reeses Book Club pick The Last Story of Mina Lee returns with a timely and surprising new novel about a familys search for answers following the disappearance of their mother.

1999: The Kim family is struggling to move on after their mother, Sunny, vanished a year ago. Sixty-one-year-old John Kim feels more isolated from his grown children, Anastasia and Ronald, than ever before. But one evening, their fragile lives are further upended when John finds the body of a stranger in the backyard, carrying a letter to Sunny, leaving the family with more questions than ever about the strangers history and possible connections to their mother.

1977: Sunny is pregnant and has just moved to Los Angeles from Korea with her aloof and often-absent husband. America is not turning out the way she had dreamed it to be, and the loneliness and isolation are broken only by a fateful encounter at a bus stop. The unexpected connection spans the decades and echoes into the familys lives in the present as they uncover devastating secrets that put not only everything they thought they knew about their mother but their very lives at risk.

Both a riveting page-turner and moving family story, What We Kept to Ourselves masterfully explores the consequences of secrets between parents and children, husbands and wives. It is the story of one unforgettable familys search for home when all seems lost, and a powerful meditation on identity, migration, and what it means to dream in America.

Reviews

Nancy Jooyoun Kims What We Kept to Ourselves illuminates the glacial secrets among a family that crackle under a glass lens. Through the brushstrokes of tragedy and grief and mystery, Kim interrogates how a forgotten past bleeds into the choices we make in our everyday lives."E. J. Koh, author of The Liberators
Nancy Jooyoun Kims What We Kept to Ourselves illuminates the glacial secrets among a family that crackle under a glass lens. Through the brushstrokes of tragedy and grief and mystery, Kim interrogates how a forgotten past bleeds into the choices we make in our everyday lives."E. J. Koh, author of The Liberators

Author Bio

Nancy Jooyoun Kim is theNew York Timesbestselling author ofWhat We Kept to Ourselves and The Last Story of Mina Lee, a Reeses Book Club pick. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.