New Release Notes 6/7/2022: Nuclear Family by Joseph Han

Nuclear Family by Joseph Han

"You’d have to visit Cirque du Soleil to see someone juggle as much as Han with such effortless dexterity and tenderness . . . Rhythmic and hypnotic; it captivates from the very first page and gracefully conveys the loss and the longing the family experiences." —The New York Times Book Review

We here at Book + Bottle are obsessed with a good ghost story. From the scary (The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson) to the deeply moving (The Sentence by Louise Erdritch), the ghost story is one of our favorite devices to speak to the deepest level of the human condition. And now, we have to add Nuclear Family to the list.

Life is beginning to change for Mr. and Mrs. Cho. A visit from Guy Fieri to their delicatessen nestled in Hawai’i helps the business explode, making their dream of franchising their Korean restaurant a possible reality. But when their son, Jacob goes viral for the wrong reasons (he just so happens to try and run across the Korean demilitarized zone, NBD), it throws everything off the rails.

What the family doesn’t understand is that Jacob has been possessed by the spirit of his grandfather (as tends to happen), who always wished to cross that great divide to reconnect with the family he left behind in the North. Jacob gets detained by the police, and all hell breaks loose - this is 2018, and the false missile alert in Hawai’i is forthcoming.Funny, striking, beautiful, this book paints the portrait of what we left behind and what we still have right here with us; of histories inherited and reunions missed, and asks us how to heal.