When Insu learns the true identity of his ghost brother, he also makes a painful discovery about the corrosive prejudices that have torn his family apart. Brother is a milestone in contemporary literature. Evocative and compelling, this magnifice nt first novel by a gifted writer captures the mystery, beauty, and pain of a young boy's world. Brother is a wonderfully lyrical and evocative portrait of an extraordinary cultural no-man's land, an area fully claimed by no one's history. This landscape may seem to be surreal, but it is all too human.
Brother is luminous, subtle, and eminently readable a pleasure.
I detect the ghost brushstrokes of Joan Didion and to borrow a comparison from the world of film Renoir. I read the novel all the way through at once and marveled at i ts poetry. To wear it is to be plunged headlong into a vast, precise universe, hitherto unknown, the world of a half Korean, half German child. The voyage is stu nning.