A Tasteful Odyssey

Trust Korean-American novelist Chang-rae Lee to craft a delectable yet healing tale using both flavours of life and food in his latest book, My Year Abroad.

Venturing out into the greater world often presents boundless opportunities. All you’ve got to do is take the first step out, even if it’s perilous. For 20-year-old college dropout Tiller Bardmon, he falls into a rabbit hole unexpectedly, thanks to his sensitive tastebuds and a friendship with Pong Lou, a shrewd Chinese-American entrepreneur acquaintance. Pandemonium ensures, obviously.

Tiller’s adventures are penned by Chang-rae Lee, Pulitzer Prize finalist and award-winning author of Native Speaker and On Such a Full Sea, in his sixth and newest novel My Year Abroad. Keeping tight-lipped about his intentions with this narrative, Lee professes that “a novel should be about many things, most of those notions open-ended and mysterious. A novel should capture the vitality of human experience and the world, in whatever it chooses to focus on, in order to present something new and fresh.

“The decision [of pursuing this genre] is both spontaneous and ever-evolving. I can only speak for my own work, but the form and character of a story develops in real-time, afterwords are put on the page, and proceeds honing and exploring. The end result is always a strange mutation of any instituting ideal.”