A novel about a woman tossed overboard by heartbreak and loss, who has to find her way back to stable shores with the help of a giant Pacific octopus.

Author photo by S. M. Sukardi

One of "22 Works of Fiction to Read This Spring"—The New York Times

A novel about a woman tossed overboard by heartbreak and loss, who has to find her way back to stable shores with the help of a giant Pacific octopus. Sea Change is an "absolutely stunning debut" novel —Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face—by Gina Chung.

Ro is stuck. She’s just entered her thirties, she’s estranged from her mother, and her boyfriend has just left her to join a mission to Mars. Her days are spent dragging herself to her menial job at a mall aquarium, and her nights are spent drinking sharktinis (Mountain Dew and copious amounts of gin, plus a hint of jalapeno). With her best friend pulling away to focus on her upcoming wedding, Ro’s only companion is Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus who also happens to be Ro's last remaining link to her father, a marine biologist who disappeared while on an expedition when Ro was a teenager. When Dolores is sold to a wealthy investor intent on moving her to a private aquarium, Ro finds herself on the precipice of self-destruction. Wading through memories of her youth, Ro has one last chance to come to terms with her childhood trauma, recommit to those around her, and find her place in an ever-changing world.

In a conversation with Frances Cha, Gina Chung talks about her debut novel.

Sea Change will be available for sale during the event.

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About the Author:

Gina Chung is a Korean American writer from New Jersey currently living in Brooklyn, New York. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, she is a 2021-2022 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Catapult, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Idaho Review, The Rumpus, Pleiades, F(r)iction, and Wigleaf, among others, and has been recognized by several contests, including the American Short(er) Fiction Contest, the Los Angeles Review Literary Awards, and the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest.

About the Moderator:

Frances Cha is the author of the novel If I Had Your Face (Ballantine, 2020), which was named one of the Best Books of the Year by Time Magazine, NPR and BBC among other publications, and is being translated into 11 languages. She is from Korea and worked as a culture editor for CNN in Seoul and Hong Kong. She has taught creative writing at Yonsei University and media studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul and currently teaches undergraduate fiction workshop at Columbia University. Her children’s book The Goblin Twins, set in Korea and New York, is forthcoming from Crown in September, 2023.