A Tender Age

By Chang-rae Lee

Book Overview

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a story of guilt, innocence, and a boy on the cusp of adolescence

"A tour de force... One of contemporary American literature's major chroniclers of manhood." --The Atlantic

" A] knockout... Lee reinvents himself with each book." --The Boston Globe

"Moving... a classic bildungsroman." --The New York Times Book Review

"He has redefined not only what it means to be American, but the fabric of the Great American Novel itself." --Jhumpa Lahiri

A spellbinding exploration of American masculinity and family dynamics as seen through the confused eyes of a prepubescent child of immigrants, A Tender Age joins the rich tradition of the American bildungsroman. The natural descendent of characters like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caufield, Korean-American Jeon-Gi is torn between competing ideas of himself. At home, his working-class parents dote on him. Outside, he is part of a roving pack of kids with dominion over a derelict baseball field, weedy parking lot, and rusty jungle gym. Getting into and out of trouble is all-consuming. But the summer he turns eleven, he becomes embroiled in a staggering series of events reverberating far beyond himself and his family.

Devastating in its emotional precision, A Tender Age captures a family and community in striking distance of the American dream, and a young person on the precipice of adult knowledge, looking at his own culpability and looking away--then thinking about it for the rest of his life.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0G2GGTQDL
• ISBN13: 9798217048441
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.98 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.8" x 8.5"