Author photo: Nina Subin

“It is a privilege to read Crystal Hana Kim’s fiction, which both edifies and enlightens.”— Min Jin Lee

A hauntingly poetic family drama and coming-of-age story that reveals a dark corner of South Korean history through the eyes of a small community living in a reformatory center, The Stone Home is a stunning work of great emotional power from Crystal Hana Kim, the critically acclaimed author of If You Leave Me.

In 2011, Eunju Oh opens her door to greet a stranger: a young Korean American woman holding a familiar-looking knife—a knife Eunju hasn’t seen in thirty years, and that connects her to a place she’d desperately hoped to leave behind forever. In South Korea in the 1980s, young Eunju and her mother are homeless on the street. After being captured by the police, they’re sent to live within the walls of a state-sanctioned reformatory center that claims to rehabilitate the nation’s citizens but hides a darker, more violent reality. While Eunju and her mother form a tight-knit community with the other women in the kitchen, two teenage brothers, Sangchul and Youngchul, are compelled to labor in the workshops and make increasingly desperate decisions—and all are forced down a path of survival, the repercussions of which will echo for decades to come.

Inspired by real events, told through alternating timelines and two intimate perspectives, The Stone Home is a deeply affecting story of a mother and daughter’s love and a pair of brothers whose bond is put to an unfathomably difficult test. Capturing a shameful period of history with breathtaking restraint and tenderness, Crystal Hana Kim weaves a lyrical exploration of the legacy of violence and the complicated psychology of power, while showcasing the extraordinary acts of devotion and friendship that can arise in the darkness.

In her conversation with Susan Choi, Crystal Hana Kim discusses her second novel.

During the event, The Stone Home will be available for purchase.

The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017

About the Author:

Crystal Hana Kim is the author of If You Leave Me, which was named one of the best books of 2018 by over a dozen publications. Kim is the recipient of the 2022 National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and is a 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize winner. Currently, she is the Visiting Assistant Professor at Queens College and a contributing editor at Apogee Journal. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.

About the Moderator:

Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction.  Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize.  Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award.  Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award.  Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, and in 2021 she received the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award for “Flashlight.”  She serves as a trustee of PEN America and teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

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