Laura Bourgeois Books

A victorian epic transplanted to Japan, following a Korean family of immigrants through eight decades and four generations. Yeongdo, Korea 1911. A club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The couple have one child, their beloved daughter Sunja. When Sunja falls pregnant by a married yakuza, the family face ruin. But then a Christian minister offers a chance of salvation: a new life in Japan as his wife. Following a man she barely knows to a hostile country where she has no friends and no home, Sunja's salvation is just the beginning of her story.

Casey Han's years at Princeton have given her 'a refined diction, an enviable golf handicap, wealthy friends, a popular white boyfriend, and a magna cum laude degree in economics.But no job, and a number of bad habits...' The elder daughter of working-class Korean immigrants who run a dry cleaning shop in Manhattan, Casey inhabits a New York a world away from that of her parents. Ambitious, spirited and obstinate, she's developed a taste for a lifestyle - and a passion for beautiful hats and expensive tailoring - she hasn't the means to sustain. And between the culture to which her family so fiercely cling and the life she aspires to, Casey must confront her own identity, the meaning of wealth, and what she really wants from her future. As Casey navigates an uneven course of small triumphs and spectacular failures, a clash of values, ideals and ambitions plays out against the colourful backdrop of New York society, it's many layers, shades and divides...