Edinburgh

A sad and powerful story of sexual abuse and human resilience. Twelve-year-old Aphias Zee (nicknamed "Fee"), a talented singer, joins a renowned boys' choir in Maine. While his Korean and Scottish ancestry sets him apart from his peers, his most horrid suffering ties them all together: Fee, like oth......more

There are certain books that so utterly evoke the depth of human emotions that all the trappings that make a novel what it is (plot, setting, characters) become secondary to the emotional landscape that the reader must traverse. This is a novel of total sensory immersion; right along with the charac......more

What is so remarkable about Alexander Chee’s debut novel Edinburgh is that he does what is so very difficult to do: he takes what is ugly and despicable and creates a compelling, utterly truthful and, yes, an even beautiful story of it. By interweaving his prose with Korean folklore, Chee imbues the......more

4.5. Chee’s prose has the same effect on me as Michael Cunningham’s, heading straight for the emotional center of pain until it expands, then releases into a tender beauty. This coming-of-age journey of Fee continues into middle age, allowing the immediacy of what happened before to be viewed anew w......more

Haunting, heart-wrenching, luminous, and lyrical, Edinburghis as beautiful as it is harrowing. It certainly my made my heart ache. Rarely have I read a novel that is able to capture with such precision and intensity the ways in which trauma affects one's memory and one's perception, of one's own se......more