Join us for a reading with Crystal Hana Kim, who will read from her new novel, The Stone Home. A conversation with Rebecca Taylor will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: A hauntingly poetic family drama and coming-of-age story that reveals a dark corner of South Korean history through the eyes of a small community living in a reformatory center—a stunning work of great emotional power from the critically acclaimed author of If You Leave Me.
In 2011, Eunju Oh opens her door to greet a stranger: a young Korean American woman holding a familiar-looking knife—a knife Eunju hasn’t seen in thirty years, and that connects her to a place she’d desperately hoped to leave behind forever.
In South Korea in the 1980s, young Eunju and her mother are homeless on the street. After being captured by the police, they’re sent to live within the walls of a state-sanctioned reformatory center that claims to rehabilitate the nation’s citizens but hides a darker, more violent reality. While Eunju and her mother form a tight-knit community with the other women in the kitchen, two teenage brothers, Sangchul and Youngchul, are compelled to labor in the workshops and make increasingly desperate decisions—and all are forced down a path of survival, the repercussions of which will echo for decades to come.
Inspired by real events, told through alternating timelines and two intimate perspectives, The Stone Home is a deeply affecting story of a mother and daughter’s love and a pair of brothers whose bond is put to an unfathomably difficult test. Capturing a shameful period of history with breathtaking restraint and tenderness, Crystal Hana Kim weaves a lyrical exploration of the legacy of violence and the complicated psychology of power, while showcasing the extraordinary acts of devotion and friendship that can arise in the darkness.
About the Author: Crystal Hana Kim is the author of the novels The Stone Home (2024) and If You Leave Me (2018), which was named a best book of the year by more than a dozen publications. Kim is the recipient of the 2022 National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and the winner of a 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her family.
About the Moderator: Rebecca Taylor cohosted the Charlottesville Reading Series from 2016 to 2019 and served as a past moderator for the Virginia Festival of the Book. Her short fiction has been adapted for film and anthologized in Makeout Creek Books’ story collection The Evil One. Her nonfiction has been published in The Believer, among others, and anthologized in the McSweeney’s essay collection Read Harder.
To order The Stone Home, please see below for the New Dominion Bookshop book order form or call the shop at 434-295-2552.
"Crystal Hana Kim brings to life a forgotten moment in South Korean history with haunting and cinematic beauty. The Stone Home’s portrait of humanity is both brutal but also illuminated with hope."
—Cathy Park Hong
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