A Tender AgeChang-rae LeeLabel: Simon & Schuster LtdDescription: 'Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee?' Los Angeles Times'He has redefined not only what it means to be American but the fabric of the Great American Novel itself.' Jhumpa Lahiri‘Chang-rae Lee can do no wrong in my mind – I devoured Lee’s last novel My Year Abroad and I can’t wait for this one.’ LitHubFrom the Pulitzer Prize shortlisted novelist a story of guilt innocence and a boy on the cusp of adolescence‘Lee’s latest novel is a tale of almosts: a family of working-class immigrants almost living the American dream; an 11-year-old boy almost transitioning into adulthood and straddling the worlds of his doting Korean parents and a semi-feral gaggle of neighborhood kids.’ New York Times Most Anticipated Books of 2026A spellbinding exploration of masculinity and family dynamics as seen through the confused eyes of a prepubescent child of immigrants A Tender Age joins the rich tradition of the coming-of-age novel. The natural descendent of characters like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caufield Korean-American Jeon-Gi is torn between competing ideas of himself. At home his working-class parents dote on him. Outside he is part of a roving pack of kids with dominion over a derelict baseball field weedy parking lot and rusty jungle gym. Getting into and out of trouble is all-consuming. But the summer he turns eleven he becomes embroiled in a staggering series of events reverberating far beyond himself and his family.Devastating in its emotional precision A Tender Age captures a family and community in striking distance of the American dream and a young person on the precipice of adult knowledge looking at his own culpability and looking away - then thinking about it for the rest of his life.
