Homeseeking
An epic tale of one couple spanning decades as world events pull them together and apart
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £0.99
Publisher Description
'What a beautiful love story'
Amazon reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
'Stunning piece of writing! Don't miss it'
Amazon reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
'Hard to put it down'
Amazon reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
'Deeply moving'
Abi Daré
'Weaves expertly between present and past'
Celeste Ng
'Unforgettable'
Washington Post
'Mesmerising'
Harper's Bazaar
Suchi first sees Haiwen in their Shanghai neighbourhood when she is seven years old, drawn by the sound of his violin. Their childhood friendship blossoms into love, but when Haiwen secretly enlists in the Nationalist army in 1947 to save his brother from the draft, Suchi is left with just his violin and a note: Forgive Me.
Sixty years later, recently widowed Haiwen spots Suchi at a grocery store in Los Angeles. It feels to Haiwen like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back. In the twilight of their lives, can they reclaim their past and the love they lost?
Homeseeking follows the separated lovers through six decades of tumultuous Chinese history, telling Haiwen's story from the present to the past while tracing Suchi's from her childhood to the present, meeting at the crucible of their lives. From Shanghai to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States, neither loses sight of the home they hold in their hearts.
'A love story in more ways than one'
Vanessa Chan
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Suchi and Haiwen are childhood friends who become young sweethearts, but their dreams of a future together are destroyed when Haiwen enlists in the army to save his brother from being drafted. There is a brief encounter on a Hong Kong ferry in the 1960s, but the two do not properly reunite until they are in their 70s and in the US. This is an epic, sweeping novel taking in 60 years of Chinese history, but also showing how pivotal historical events play out on a personal level. Debut writer Karissa Chen makes us believe in the two protagonists and their choices. Fate may have put Suchi and Haiwen back in the same geographical location, but they have lived very different lives, and their potential second chance is navigated with nuance and heart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sweeping and heart-rending debut, Chen brings to life more than 60 years of Chinese history through the tale of childhood sweethearts separated by war and reunited decades later in America. Haiwen, a recent widower, and Suchi, who helps raise her grandkids, cross paths while shopping in 2008 Los Angeles. The two first met as kindergartners in 1930s Shanghai and fell in love as teenagers but were separated by the war between Mao's Communists and Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalists. In the historical timeline, Haiwen enlists in the Nationalist army in a misguided effort to help his family, a decision that will tragically reverberate through succeeding generations. Suchi, meanwhile, is sent to Hong Kong with her older sister to escape the war. At times, Chen relies too much on expositional dialogue to capture historical nuances, such as mainlander suppression of native Taiwanese culture, but in tracing Haiwen's and Suchi's diverging paths, she conveys the breadth of their sacrifices, making their eventual reunion all the more poignant. As she writes about Suchi's realizations: "Home wasn't a place.... It was people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, of places long disappeared." For the most part, Chen scales the heights of her ambition.
