Author Jimin Han, right, and the cover of her book “The Apology” released in August [JIMIN HAN, LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY]
Death and the afterlife are a chance to right wrongs for the centenarian in author Jimin Han’s latest novel, “The Apology.”
Called a “sweeping intergenerational saga” by fellow author Kristen Chen, “The Apology” (Little, Brown and Company) follows 105-year-old Korean matriarch Hak Jeonga as she voyages to the United States with her two 100-plus sisters to visit their estranged sister’s great-grandson, who is very sick. The journey is filled with “darkly humorous bickering, worrying over anti-aging skin care and designer clothes,” wrote the New York Times, but Jeonga endures it all because she has her own hidden reason for the trip: to make sure family secrets locked up for decades remain secret to protect her family’s reputation. However, she dies mid-book, and the latter half takes place in Jeonga’s afterlife, where she becomes aware that all her wrong decisions will curse her family.
The book tackles themes of grief, loss, aging and separation, drawn from the author’s own bifurcated past and the stories of her family, who fled to the South from North Korea during the Korean War. Han said she was also dealing with the loss of her mother, the imminent death of a close friend and the uncertainty of Covid-19 while writing the book.
But also prevalent throughout “The Apology” is piercing humor. Han’s protagonist notes how picky old people can be about food, saying, “I’d read that the gustatory modality is the last of the five senses to diminish with age, and my sisters proved it.” In her afterlife, she discovers that the man she thought was her life’s love had only left her “one-fifth…
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