On Such a Full Sea
2016 Longlist

On Such a Full Sea

ABOUT
THE BOOK

In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class-descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China-find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement.

In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan’s journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind.

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR Chang-rae
Lee

Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award for first fiction; A Gesture Life; Aloft; The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and On Such a Full Sea. Selected by The New Yorker as one of the “20 Writers for the 21st Century,” Chang-rae Lee is Professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and a Shinhan Distinguished Visiting Professor at Yonsei University.

Photo Credit: Michelle Branca Lee

Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award for first fiction; A Gesture Life; Aloft; The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and On Such a Full Sea. Selected by The New Yorker as one of the “20 Writers for the 21st Century,” Chang-rae Lee is Professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and a Shinhan Distinguished Visiting Professor at Yonsei University.

Photo Credit: Michelle Branca Lee

NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS

A dystopian sci-fi taking place in future USA with a touch of allegory to the story and a grace to the narration that rescues the brutality of the story.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Date published
07/01/2014
Author
Publisher
Riverhead Books

STAY CONNECTED

Stay in touch and sign up to our newsletter to receive all the latest news and updates on the Dublin Literary Award.