The year 2023 has been the single most productive year for Korean American fiction in its entire history. In my previous roundups of KA novels and books of short stories published in a given year, the average has been five to seven volumes. Astoundingly, this year saw the appearance of no fewer than eighteen novels and two short story collections, not counting YA and children’s books (see Sarah Park Dahlen’s roundup for them). This is a historic achievement for Korean American contribution to both American and world literature and should be celebrated as a significant milestone.
Twenty Korean American Fiction Novels of 2023 (in alphabetical order of authors’ names):
1. Jinwoo Chong, Flux
A wildly imaginative science fiction novel about a biracial Korean American who is hired by a high-tech company with an uncertain and sinister mission. At the same time, a young boy is mourning the death of his mother and a middle-aged man is trying to put his life together after coming out of a coma. Their stories intertwine as it is revealed that the company may be using its employees for experiments with time travel technology.
2. Gina Chung, Sea Change
In the near future, a Korean American woman is heartbroken after her boyfriend leaves her to go to Mars. In her grief, she finds comfort in her relationship with a giant octopus at the aquarium where she works. She is faced with a serious moral dilemma when she finds out that the octopus is set to be sold to a rich patron of the aquarium.
3. Heinz Insu Fenkl, Skull Water
Follow up memoir/novel to Memories of My Ghost Brother, this is a powerful narrative of biracial kids of US servicemen serving in Korea and Korean mothers. Living in US military bases, a group of boys decide to help an uncle of one of them who has a wound that won’t heal. To do so, they must find a skull to collect water with that could help him. A harrowing coming-of-age story set in 1970s South Korea.
4. Jimin Han, The Apology
A trio of wealthy Korean sisters, who are all over the age of hundred, find themselves having to travel to the United States to safeguard a dark family secret. As they connect with members of their extended family in the country, the story takes a supernatural turn for one of the sisters. But even in the afterlife she must continue to fulfill her vital mission.
5. Johanna Hedva, Your Love Is Not Good
A biracial Korean American artist living in Los Angeles is on the verge of becoming a success with upcoming solo shows in LA and Berlin. But her journey is made complicated by her obsession with a model that she imagines resembles her, and memories of her abusive mother who inspired her to become an artist. In the face of a rival artist’s call to boycott major venues of art, she must figure out the meaning of her art while struggling with the traumas of her past.
6. Angie Kim, Happiness Falls
A father goes missing during a hike with his non-verbal autistic son who is unable to explain what happened. As the family scrambles desperately to figure out the mystery, the biracial Korean American daughter makes a series of unsettling discoveries about her father and brother. Her search for the truth leads to profound meditations on the nature of happiness, memory, and human communication.
7. Nancy Jooyoun Kim, What We Kept to Ourselves
A Korean American woman living in Los Angeles disappears, leaving her husband and two children to reckon with the loss and uncertainty. A year later, the dead body of an African American man is found in their yard, prompting an investigation by the police. As the two siblings try to figure out the hidden family secrets that may have led to the mysterious events, their father and missing mother remember their immigrant journey to the United States that was filled with broken dreams and promises.
8. E. J. Koh, The Liberators
A poetic, meditative narrative of a family that leaves South Korea during the dictatorship of the 1980s to make a new life in northern California and, later, Washington state. Even as the three generations of the immigrant family navigate their way through the new country, they must contend with the traumas they carried from their homeland. Their lives intersect with others going through such journeys, including a quixotic activist for Korean unification and a refugee from North Korea.
9. Chin-Sun Lee, Upcountry
A couple from New York City buys a house in a small town in the Catskills looking for a new start. The artist husband develops an infatuation with a pregnant Korean American woman who is part of a religious community in the town. His attempt to create some kind of bond with her sets off a series of events with terrible consequences for many people in the community.
10. Mirinae Lee, 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster
A volunteer at an old people’s care facility listens to the story of a patient who is almost a hundred. She describes eight different lives she led in different periods of history, from that of a daughter of a fisherwoman, to a comfort woman forced to serve Japanese soldiers during World War II, to a North Korean spy. A creative rendering of women’s lives during some of the most harrowing times of Korean history.
11. Marcus Brotherton and Tosca Lee, The Long March Home
A riveting novel of World War II about three friends from Alabama who enlist in the army and are stationed in the Philippines just before the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the commencement of the Pacific War, they are taken prisoner by the Japanese army and endure the Bataan Death March as well as the horrors of the prisoner of war camps after. In the next three years they struggle to survive and return home to their loved ones.
12. Hannah Michell, Excavations
In 1992, a commercial building in Seoul collapses. As the wife of an engineer who works at the site tries desperately to find out what happened to her husband, she unearths dark secrets concerning the building and the powerful people who built it. Her search for the truth also reveals the nature of endemic corruption in the larger economic and political spheres of the country.
13. Joe Milan, All-American
A Korean American adoptee, living in poverty in Washington state, is deported to South Korea (although he speaks no Korean and knows nothing about Korea) because his original immigration papers were not filed properly. Once he arrives in the country, he is conscripted into the army. After surviving basic training while trying to learn the language, he is stationed at a remote island where he undergoes a series of strange (mis)adventures.
14. Ed Park, Same Bed, Different Dreams
An epic experimental novel that alternates between the Asian American literary world in contemporary New York and a series of vignettes that tells a speculative tale of modern Korean history. After the colonization of Korea by the Empire of Japan in 1910, independence activists set up a provisional government of Korea in Shanghai. What if the organization did not disband after liberation but went on to affect the course of Korean history?
15. Matthew Salesses, The Sense of Wonder
An engaging narrative of three Korean Americans in popular media – a basketball star who is the only Asian American in the NBA, his TV producer girlfriend who is bringing K-drama to America, and their friend who is a sportswriter. In the stories of their intertwined lives, they struggle with their identities as they try to find their places in society. An insightful and often hilarious look at the current state of Korean Americans in the larger American culture.
16. Carol Roh Spaulding, Waiting For Mr. Kim and Other Stories
Interlinked short stories and a novella about three generations of a Korean immigrant family living in the San Francisco Bay Area. The first story begins in the 1920s, when a young woman travels from Busan to the United States, with her young son in tow, to be united with her husband who left ten years before. Their America-born daughter Grace becomes the central character of the later stories, from her childhood in Oakland to her senior years in the 1990s.
17. Ellen Won Steil, Fortune
A mystery involving the dark secrets of three women in a small town in Iowa. After the apparent death of a billionaire industrialist, his widow is confronted with a disturbing evidence of her husband’s connection to a dead baby that was found in the town eighteen years before. Also implicated are a state senator, a divorce attorney, and a Korean American single mother who were all friends in high school.
18. Sung J. Woo, Deep Roots
This is the second mystery novel featuring the Korean American adoptee private detective Siobhan O’Brien. On an intriguing new job, O’Brien is summoned to a private island owned by a Korean American billionaire to ascertain the identity of his son and heir to his immense fortune. In the course of her investigation, she must deal with the eccentric members of the extended family who all seem to harbor secret agendas.
19. Esther Yi, Y/N
A surreal and often hilarious story of a Korean American woman working in Berlin who is taken to a K-pop concert despite her indifference to the music. She unexpectedly develops an obsession for a member of the K-pop group about whom she begins to write romantic fan fiction. She follows her infatuation all the way to Korea hoping to establish a real connection with the object of her desire.
20. Paul Yoon, The Hive and the Honey: Stories
Seven exquisitely written stories that tell stories of Koreans in varied places and times – in modern day New York City, London, and in a small town in Spain, in Far East Russia of the nineteenth century and after glasnost, in Japan of the seventeenth century, and in Korea after the Korean War. The common theme that runs through them is the loneliness of lost souls trying to find connections in the desolate worlds their lives took them to.
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