5 Books That Will Surprise You

The men and women in Yoon's globe-spanning story collection are displaced—by war, poverty and family upheaval. In spare, matter-of-fact terms, Yoon conveys loss that is at once unfathomable and commonplace. The narrator of the opening story recalls accompanying his mother to the sanatorium where she tended to soldiers wounded in World War I. One patient longingly spoke of a woman: "Oh, her breasts, he said, and he began to cry, openmouthed, his shoulders shaking and his saliva dripping onto his blanket, which hid the fact that he was missing his legs." Each of these six stories has the sweep, complexity and emotional depth of a novel. "Still a Fire" shows us the burning intersection in the lives of a land mine victim and a drug-addicted nurse; in the stellar title story, a woman toiling in a Shanghai camera factory is determined to return to the scene of her father's wrongful death. Everyone in these pages is searching for home, seeking release from isolation, quietly surviving. It's the courageousness of the quest that makes Yoon's book so moving.