The Interpreter

Kim’s recent memoir, Without You, There Is No Us, detailed Kim’s (born in Korea and raised in the United States) experience teaching English to the sons of North Korea’s 1 percent. But her 2003 novel focuses on the Korean immigrant experience in America through the story of a young woman whose parents are murdered in the bodega they manage. She soon learns that their deaths are not random and is slowly drawn into the community’s dark, mistrustful underbelly. Kim nails the voice of a woman wedged between two cultures, not sure whether she really belongs in either. Many stories about first-generation Americans veer toward the nostalgic or the hardscrabble, but The Interpreter doesn’t take easy paths.

Drama