Don Lee

Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning author DON LEE—author of Yellow, Country of Origin, Wrack and Ruin, and The Collective—for a discussion of his latest novel, Lonesome Lies Before Us, a contemporary ballad of heartbreak, failure, and unquenchable longing. Lee will be joined in conversation by PAUL YOON, author of Snow Hunters and the forthcoming story collection The Mountain.

About Lonesome Lies Before Us

Yadin Park is a talented alt-country musician whose career has floundered—doomed first by his homely looks and lack of stage presence and then by a progressive hearing disorder. His girlfriend, Jeanette Matsuda, might have been a professional photographer but for a devastating heartbreak in her teens. Now Yadin works for Jeanette’s father’s carpet-laying company in California while Jeanette cleans rooms at a local resort.

When Yadin’s former lover and musical partner, the celebrated Mallory Wicks, comes back into his life, all their most private hopes and desires are exposed, their secret fantasies about love and success put to the test.

Drawn to the music of indie singer-songwriters like Will Johnson, who helped shape the lyrics in this book, Don Lee has written a novel that unforgettably captures America’s deepest yearnings. Beautifully sad and laced with dark humor, Lonesome Lies Before Us is a profound, heartfelt romance, a soulful and memorable song.

Praise

“In Don Lee’s wonderfully lyrical novel, all sorts of beautiful losers love and leave, burn out and fade away, try to make something out of nothing, and drift apart even as they come together. There is faded glory here, making Lonesome Lies Before Us a kind of allegory for the faded dream of America itself.” —Marlon James, Booker Prize–winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings

"A master of detail and understatement, Don Lee explores the inner solitude of his characters like a spelunker in a massive cave, revealing beauty with a single piercing light." —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer

"Burning with courage and frighteningly wise, Lonesome Lies Before Us is simply the best—the deepest, most knowing and unsparing—novel about the inhumanity of the world of work in the spiritually depleted twenty-first century that I have seen. But Don Lee’s genius—his originality and dazzling versatility, his intelligence and wit—doesn’t stop there. Somehow he manages to crosscut this bleak vision with a poignant, almost religious view of the vocation of a true artist." —Jaimy Gordon, National Book Award–winning author of Lord of Misrule