The Sisters K

by Maureen Sun

Overview

“You’re my sister, but I’m not sure I love you. I’m not sure I love anyone. But if someone hurt you I’d want to kill him. I’d want him to die in pain. And he has hurt you…” 

When Eugene Kim assembles his three estranged daughters at his deathbed, he means to put them to the test. Vicious and pathetic in equal measure, he wants to test who will abject themselves for his favor— and, more importantly, his fortune. 

For Minah, the eldest, the money would be recompense for their father’s cruelty. A practicing lawyer with an icy pragmatism and dreams of motherhood, she sets to work on securing her inheritance, whatever the cost. 

To Sarah, a gifted and embittered academic who wields her intelligence like a knife, the money feels more like a trap: as Eugene’s unwilling favorite, his return to her life is to reckon with desperation. 

It is left to Esther, the youngest, with her need to find connection and do right by everyone, to illuminate the complicated love that binds them to each other. 

Each isolated and desperate to escape their circumstances, the sisters wrestle with the legacy of their abusive father as they attempt to imagine a future with others— colleagues, lovers, friends, family— as rage and shame courses through their blood. A modern reimagining of Dostoevsky’s dark classic, The Brothers Karamazov, Maureen Sun’s debut novel is a vivid drama about what it is we owe each other, and ourselves, when vengeance is the only thing called for. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781961884076
Publisher:	The Unnamed Press
Publication date:	06/11/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	715,761
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Maureen Sun has lived and worked in the US, England, France, Korea, and Hong Kong, and has taught at Princeton, the University of Hong Kong, Barnard, and NYU. Her essay “My Silent Childhood”, published in the Yale Review, received a notable selection in Best American Essays (2021). 

Editorial Reviews

04/22/2024

In Sun’s inspired debut, three Korean American sisters and their half brother reunite in the present day after learning that their widowed father is terminally ill. The story begins three decades earlier in Los Angeles, where Eugene Kim physically and psychologically abuses his second wife, Jeonghee, and his three daughters, Minah, Sarah, and Esther. Though neighbors frequently call the police, Eugene faces no consequences for the beatings, prompting Minah to realize that his first wife, her birth mother, was also “desperate to escape” when she left years earlier. Now a 34-year-old lawyer who has dedicated her life to upholding the justice that eluded her as a child, Minah hasn’t seen Eugene since she left home at 17. Though literature professor Sarah is Eugene’s favorite, it’s Esther who’s the first of the sisters to respond to their father’s invitation to visit him in New Jersey after he’s diagnosed with cancer. When Edwin, a son Eugene had out of wedlock, makes a surprise arrival, the sisters learn that because of the state’s inheritance laws, he may stand to inherit everything. The revelations and reconciliations that ensue make for a fascinating update on the age-old theme of filial piety. Sun marks herself as a writer to watch. Agent: Amelia Atlas, CAA. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Amid the thousands of novels based on familial drama, The Sisters K stands as a true original. It is an intense, subtle and extremely complex story of love and hate, and, beyond that, the mystery of biological and emotional ties. In drawing her anguished, gallant characters, Maureen Sun has almost invented a new way of describing the inner lives of humans; it is an achievement." —Mary Gaitskill, author of Veronica

"There's a brutal misogynist logic that underpins Korean patriarchal culture and yet it is so rarely dramatized this intimately in Korean American fiction; here it organizes every part of these sisters' lives, as it does for so many. Chilling, tender, fierce and sharp, the resulting novel is an inheritance drama where everyone is running from their family, one of the most original novels about sisters and family I've read in some time.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

From the Publisher

★ 2024-04-05
A reimagining of The Brothers Karamazov with three Korean American sisters in the titular roles.

Minah, Sarah, and Esther Kim are raised under the shadow of their father Eugene’s extreme cruelty. The eldest, Minah, was born to a different mother than the younger two, but she’s raised alongside them under the insufficient care of their terminally ill mother, Jeonghee, while the girls’ father uses her as a target for his frequent rages. After Jeonghee’s death, Minah distances herself from her family and eventually becomes a successful lawyer who “feel[s] most spiritual" when putting on makeup or new clothes. Minah plans to extend the sensual joy she takes in the world to the experience of having children and is bending her will toward finding a man who will enable these future plans. Sarah, the middle child and her father’s favorite, is brilliant, an Ivy League graduate who finds herself cynically alienated from a society she sees as filled with “suffering and sadism and selfishness.” Alone of the sisters, Esther has drifted out into the world without a plan to govern her future decisions, and yet has managed to keep an essential compassion for humanity, including her increasingly abusive father, even through the deprivations of her wanderings. The sisters lose touch as adults, but they’re brought back into daily contact when Eugene announces not only that he’s dying, but that the Sisters K have a long-lost illegitimate brother whom they must factor into their plans for their eventual inheritance. As the sisters negotiate their philosophical views on pleasure and suffering, rage and shame, duty and freely given love, Sun patiently translates the core values of Dostoevsky’s timeless work into the idioms of late capitalism, where the sisters’ available identities are refracted through the prism of not one but two paternalistic societies—Korean and American. The result is a book that does far more than retell a classic tale: it constructs a whole new vocabulary to discuss the most central of human conundrums: how to love and be loved in return.

A deeply intelligent examination of the ties that both define and bind our lives.

Kirkus Reviews