When Suchi meets Haiwen as children in 1930s Shanghai, she is immediately drawn to the small, quietly self-assured boy. Wrapped up in his world of music, he dreams of being a violinist, while she dreams of being a singer. A friendship blossoms and before they know it feelings have grown. But Shanghai is under Japanese occupation, times are volatile and uncertain, and as the world around them tremors, what they have is threatened. 

Sweeping across continents and generations, and changing social, political and global climates, Homeseeking is a deeply moving multigenerational family saga and historical fiction, with a beautiful love story at the heart of it. Moving back and forth in time, from Shanghai in the 1930s and 40s, to LA in the 2000s, and a selection of other places and points in time in between, this is a long enough novel to really get lost in, one which explores so many themes: a pivotal time in Chinese history, the nuances of language as a part of identity and as a tool for survival, the hopes parents have for their children and the ambitions we harbour for ourselves, immigrant life, motherhood, the desperate measures we take to survive, and the secrets that tear families apart. The novel opens with an interesting note from the author on language, and how she has endeavoured to keep faithful to shifts in language and names as her characters move through different Chinese-speaking regions of the world.

I really loved this book. Suchi and Haiwen are such well developed characters and the passion they both feel, in very different ways, for the futures they envision for themselves and their loved ones is beautifully explored; as we follow them through the years, we see them grow, we see how they keep so many traits they had as children, and yet in other ways they change and surprise us, influenced by the forces at work around them. With immersive writing, Chen beautifully captures a sense of what our protagonists have endured over the years, and how the key characters we meet throughout the novel strive to understand the generations who went before them. This is beautiful, emotive, compelling storytelling with a deftly captured sense of place – the longtangs of Shanghai in particular –  that really draws you into Suchi and Haiwen’s worlds.

***

Homeseeking is published by Sceptre. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the DRC.

***

Karissa Chen is a Fulbright fellow, Kundiman Fiction fellow, and a VONA/Voices fellow whose fiction and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Eater, The Cut, NBC News THINK!, Longreads, PEN America, Catapult, Gulf Coast, and Guernica, among others. She was awarded an artist fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts as well as multiple writing residencies including at Millay Arts, where she was a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others. She was formerly a senior fiction editor at The Rumpus and currently serves as the editor-in-chief at Hyphen magazine. She received an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and splits her time between New Jersey and Taipei, Taiwan.

​