Eighty Days of Sunlight

After suffering a childhood “accident” involving a campfire and a bullet, Jason Han spends his childhood being cared for by a doctor in Princeton, NJ while the rest of his family lives in a factory town near Scranton, PA. Years later, as they prepare for college, Jason and his older brother, Tommy, reluctantly work together to investigate their father’s suicide. 


Ultimately, the investigation concludes violently, and the brothers move to Pittsburgh where they attempt to cohabitate peacefully while working to settle their father’s complicated estate. Together, they explore the city once described as “hell with the lid off,” full of post-industrial landscapes and sultry coeds. The brothers also travel landscapes of guilt, betrayal, and secrets as they try to figure out what destroyed their family—and how to save what’s left of it.


Eighty Days of Sunlight is Robert Yune’s debut novel, a poignant coming-of-age tale that brilliantly tackles the prickly relationship between two brothers, exploring themes of trust, identity, and loss. 


This book was nominated by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award.  Other nominees include Jonathan Franzen, Margaret Atwood, Isabel Allende, and Lauren Groff.


–Praise for EIGHTY DAYS OF SUNLIGHT–


“Robert Yune is a writer to watch out for. No, Robert Yune is a writer to find right now. Robert Yune is unafraid of leaving blood and blood’s endless questions on the page. This is a book about brothers, about family, about adoption, about inheritance, about home. This is a book about books. This is a book about this world we live in. This is a book about you.”–Matthew Salesses, author of The Hundred-Year Flood and Different Racisms


“[A] moving and darkly comic….Equal parts hilarity and heartbreak in an accomplished debut.”–Kirkus Reviews


“Robert Yune is a wonderfully perceptive, imaginative, and funny writer. In Eighty Days of Sunlight, he gives us an illumined view of a factory where books are made, an exploration of the crucial bond of brotherhood, and an original homage to being young in Pittsburgh, a city that beautifully springs to life on the page, thanks to Yune’s uniquely observant narrator.”–Jane McCafferty, award-winning author of First You Try Everything and One Heart


“Quite simply, I love and admire this wonderful novel mightily, and boldly predict that it introduces us to a young writer who is on the threshold of becoming an important voice in American literature.”–Chuck Kinder, author of New York Times-Notable novel Honeymooners and the memoir Last Mountain Dancer