"Elinor Hanson, a forty-something former model, is struggling to reinvent herself as a freelance writer when she receives an unexpected assignment. Her mentor from grad school offers her a chance to write for a prestigious magazine about the Bakken oil boom in North Dakota. Elinor grew up near the Bakken, raised by an overbearing father and a distant Korean mother who met and married when he was stationed overseas. After decades away from home, Elinor...

A new collection of stories by successful author and biographer Yiyun Li, written over the span of a decade, which articulate the cost, both material and emotional, of living: exile, assimilation, loss, and love.