Travel Bug Book Group

American Hagwon
by Min Jin Lee
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“…It had that Brothers Karamazov feel that everything is incredibly intense and everything is at stake all of the time. And that these are remarkable individual characters who have these remarkable relationships. But at the same time your writing is obviously very different. There’s a humility and there’s a distance and there’s a willingness to let things happen on their own. So an epic in disguise is sort of how I felt about this book. And when I say Brothers Karamazov I am being completely serious because Brothers Karamazov is one of the few novels that when I read it and I felt, ok it’s hitting me, I’m being hit in the gut, I’m literally crying, things are happening to me inside, psysiologically in this novel, and I felt this same way about your book.”
—Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” in conversation with Min Jin Lee.

“American Hagwon is striking in that it counters the old "show, don't tell" writing adage: Instead, there's plenty of exposition in this novel and, yet, not a page is workmanlike. In fact, Lee is so deft that she conjures epiphanies out of the simplest material.”
—Maureen Corrigan, Book Critic, Fresh Air

From the author of the critically lauded modern classic Pachinko comes a kaleidoscopic epic set across Korea, Australia and the United States as the Koh family strive to live worthwhile lives amidst tumult and uncertainty.

John and Helen Koh and their three children – Bo, DH, and Mido – are building new lives in Korea when they find their worlds upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, and then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Striving to regain their footing, the Koh’s set their sights on doing whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. They leave Seoul for Sydney and then eventually settle in California, where new opportunities open for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, adjust to a new existence in which their qualifications mean little. The Kohs, their friends, relatives and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate love, work, fortune and fulfilment across the years.

Through masterfully controlled storytelling, Lee patiently explores how her characters' fortunes are shaped by forces from without and within: the powerful lure of sex, the sucking vacuum of greed, the insidiousness of racism, the obligations between parents and children. In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted a transcendent novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions.

Available at Travel Bug or purchase online from us: https://bookshop.org/shop/TravelBug

Discussion group is hosted in Travel Bug the first Wednesday of the month by Aimee Gwynne Franklyn, an independent curator, art historian and producer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Exit Party
by Emily St. John Mandel
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The award-winning, bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility returns with a breathtaking novel of doubles, shadow worlds, and fractured timelines as a man disappears from a glittering Los Angeles party, and a woman—a gunrunner, an art collector, an operative of the State—searches for answers.

“The only world-builder more efficient than Mandel may be God. . . . Exit Party is the kind of novel you’ll be desperate to talk about.”
—Ron Charles

"EXIT PARTY raises important questions about who people are when not just personal but societal circumstances change."
—The New York Times

Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted. Ari Waker and her roommate pass the gauntlet of bomb-sniffing dogs, the shanty towns, and the Red Cross tents as they walk across Silverlake to a party. The mood is ecstatic inside the apartment, people drink and dance, a woman wears a silver dress, pleated like tinfoil. And then: A shift. A bewildered twin, an uncanny doppelganger stumbles through the crowd and out into the night, and Kareem, the party’s host, vanishes into thin air.

As Ari Waker unravels the mystery of this inexplicable night, Emily St. John Mandel unfurls a story that takes us from a future America splintered by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece where weapons dealers hide in an elegant resort, and from the domed city of Paris to a colony on the moon. An unforgettable literary feat, Exit Party is a novel about the price of safety, the perils of the surveillance state, a requiem for a world not unlike our own, and a breathtaking story of resilience in the face of cataclysmic change. As the narrator pointedly asks near the novel’s close, “Who will you be at the end of the world?”

Available at Travel Bug or purchase online from us: https://bookshop.org/shop/TravelBug

Discussion group is hosted in Travel Bug the first Wednesday of the month by Aimee Gwynne Franklyn, an independent curator, art historian and producer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

buy from us online: book audiobook