On Such A Full Sea

“Watching a talented writer take a risk is one of the pleasures of devoted reading, and provides all that and more. . With , [Chang-rae Lee] has found a new way to explore his old preoccupation: the oft-told tale of the desperate, betraying, lonely human heart.”—Andrew Sean Greer,

“I've never been a fan of grand hyperbolic declarations in book reviews, but faced with , I have no choice but to ask: Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee today?”—Porochista Khakpour,

From the beloved award-winning author of and , a highly provocative, deeply affecting story of one woman’s legendary quest in a shocking, future America.

On Such a Full Sea

In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class — descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China — find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement.

In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan’s journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind.