To The Last Page

The incident told at the start of Chang-rae Lee's latest novel was inspired by the experience of the author's father as a child in 1950, a North Korean citizen evacuated as the war intensified between North and South. His father's experience here transmogrified into the attempt of June Han to flee with her younger brother and sister, it's a heart-wrenching episode that sets the tone for what is to follow. Unexpectedly however, much of the remainder of the novel relates to an older June living in New York in the 1980s, who is suffering from a terminal illness and has just sold up her antique business, planning to go searching not for any of her lost siblings during the war, but for her son Nicholas - a young boy with a troubled childhood who has disappeared and is suspected to be living a life of fraud and petty crime in Italy.  The location and time period may change, but essentially the characteristics set out at the beginning of the novel remain constant. This is a bo...