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I LEAVE IT UP TO YOU HALF HIS AGE ATOMIC HEARTS MUDLARK GREEDY BEST WOMAN MURDER ON SEX ISLAND RULES FOR GHOST
ING IF YOU’RE SEEING THIS, IT’S MEANT FOR YOU THE GREATEST NOBODIES OF HISTORY TWO LEFT FEET

PRAISE

I Leave It Up to You is funny and tender, with characters whose lives are satisfyingly messy. Jinwoo Chong is a writer for those of us who exist between cultures and identities.” —GABRIELLE ZEVIN

“Alive and boisterous and entirely profound . . . a riot and a tender exploration of (re)discovering your place in the world.” —BRYAN WASHINGTON

“Sweet and satisfying without sacrificing bite . . . achieves that which we cherish in our most favorite works: an unvarnished reflection of reality.” —MATEO ASKARIPOUR

“A master storyteller . . . A novel about second chances, the many threads of love that tie people together in the face of loss, and the maddening complexities of family devotion, this is a spectacular book.”—CRYSTAL HANA KIM

I LEAVE IT UP TO YOU

by JINWOO CHONG

Waking up is an easy thing to do. To be asleep, then not. To be a mind out there in the dark with no ground underneath.

A coma can change a man, but the world Jack Jr. awakens to is one he barely recognizes. His advertising job is history, his Manhattan apartment is gone, and the love of his life has left him behind. He’s been asleep for two years; with no one to turn to, he realizes it’s been ten years since he last saw his family.

Lost and disoriented, he makes a reluctant homecoming back to the bustling Korean American enclave of
Fort Lee, New Jersey; back into the waiting arms of his parents, who are operating under the illusion that he never left; and back to Joja, their ever-struggling sushi restaurant that he was set to inherit before he ran away from it all. As he steps back into the life he abandoned—learning his Appa’s life lessons over crates of tuna on bleary-eyed 4 a.m. fish runs, doling out amberjack behind the omakase counter while his Umma tallies the night’s pitiful number of customers, and sparring with his recovering alcoholic brother, James—he embraces new roles, too: that of romantic interest to the nurse who took care of him, and that of sage (but underqualified) uncle to his gangly teenage nephew.

There is value in the
joyous rhythms of this once-abandoned life. But second chances are an even messier business than running a restaurant, and the lure of a self-determined path might, once again, prove too hard to resist.

AUTHOR

Jinwoo Chong is the author of the novels I Leave It Up to You and Flux, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and named a best book of the year by Apple Books, Amazon Books, Esquire, HuffPost, GQ, Cosmopolitan, and Goodreads. His work has appeared in Guernica, The Southern Review, The Rumpus, LitHub, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Electric Literature.

FOR

. . . fans of Emma Straub’s All Adults Here, Steven Rowley’s The Guncle, Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here, and Rachel Khong’s Real Americans.

. . . sushi lovers, second-gen children of immigrants shouldering colossal expectations, playwriting enthusiasts, and gays.