Like Wind Against Rock

Long-buried family secrets threaten to ripple dangerously through a Korean American community when Alice Chang Markson’s father dies unexpectedly, and her mother immediately transforms herself from traditional Korean wife into a sexy, swinging single and successful businesswoman. Mystified by her mother’s behavior and unmoored by her own recent divorce, Alice decides to have her father’s private journal translated, believing it holds the key to understanding her parents’ marriage and how she herself became an underachieving, sweatpants-wearing couch potato in her late 30s, living in her childhood home after the failure of a stable but childless and passionless 14-year marriage. Shot through with humor and empathy, this well-crafted novel weaves together the stories of various lives of quiet desperation, with themes of first- and second-generation immigrant identity and belonging, from different perspectives.