The Sisters K

by Maureen Sun

Overview

"It is an achievement." —Mary Gaitskill

"Clear-sighted and unafraid... this is, simply put, an excellent novel." —Ling Ma, author of Severance and Bliss Montage

"Chilling, tender, fierce and sharp... 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

“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…” 

After years of estrangement, Minah, Sarah, and Esther have been forced together again. Called to their father’s deathbed, the sisters must confront a man little changed by the fact of his mortality. Vicious and pathetic in equal measure, Eugene Kim wants one thing: to see which of his children will abject themselves for his favor— and more importantly, his fortune. From their childhood in California to the depths of a mid-Atlantic winter, the solitary sisters Kim must face a brutal past colliding with their present. Grasping at their broken bonds of sisterhood, they will do what is necessary to escape the tragedy of their circumstances—whatever the cost. 

For Minah, the eldest, the money would be recompense for their father’s cruelty. A practicing lawyer with an icy pragmatism, she dreams of a family of her own and sets to work on securing her inheritance. For Sarah, a gifted and embittered academic who wields her intelligence like a weapon, confronting her father again forces her to reckon with the desperation of her present life. It is left to the youngest— directionless and loving Esther— to care for their father in her lonely quest to do right by everyone. A fortune pales in comparison to the prospect of finally reuniting with her sisters. 

With a legacy of violence haunting their lives, the sisters dare to imagine a better future even as their father’s poison courses through their blood. A contemporary reimagining of Dostoevsky’s dark classic, The Brothers Karamazov, Maureen Sun’s brilliant debut is a vivid and visceral exploration of rage, shame, and the betrayals of intimacy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781961884069
Publisher:	The Unnamed Press
Publication date:	06/11/2024
Pages:	380
Sales rank:	625,280
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Maureen Sun has lived and worked in the U.S., England, France, Korea, and Hong Kong, and taught literature at Princeton, Barnard, NYU, and the University of Hong Kong. She is at work on a second novel.

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