Historical Fiction Book Launch: Song for Another Home by Bora Lee Reed

Join us for the launch for Bora Lee Reed's new novel, Song for Another Home!

Bora will be joined by author Tracey Gee for a conversation on Korean history, family ties, and generational memory.

About the participants:

Bora Lee Reed was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the US as a young child. She grew up in Southern California among a vibrant Korean immigrant community. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and has been awarded residences from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, and Ucross. Bora now lives in Berkeley, CA, where she works as the director of communications for UC Berkeley’s public policy school.

Tracey Gee is a certified leadership coach and consultant who is passionate about helping others lead with authenticity and self-trust. She is the author of The Magic of Knowing What You Want in which she invites readers to honor their desires and redefine success on their own terms. Raised in the Bay Area of California and now based in Los Angeles, Tracey is always up for talking coffee shops or dog stories.

About the book:

Pachinko meets Homegoing in this powerful story of family separation and reunion amid love and war from a Reese’s Book Club LitUp fellow.

When news hits in 1950 that the Americans have entered the war between North and South Korea, Oksoon and her family believe the conflict will soon end. But then China joins the war, and they decide to flee their home in Pyongyang despite the freezing temperatures and lack of food. Journeying from the barren, war-torn streets of the North in the winter to the seedy back alleys of the South Korean capital of Seoul in the summer, the family falls in with an unlikely group of miscreants.

Meanwhile, far to the south, Oksoon’s cousin Junho seeks refuge at an orphanage for abandoned children. As the institution struggles to keep its doors open, Junho, with his elementary command of English, is tasked with drafting letters to American missionaries and benefactors to ask for money. When the enigmatic director brings her aristocratic niece to the orphanage, Junho finds himself caught between his impulse for survival and his growing affections for the young woman, even though his feelings put him at risk of being expelled from the only safe place he knows.

Movingly rendered, Song for Another Home highlights the power of resilience, the tension between personal dreams and duty to family, and how choices made in a brief moment have consequences that reverberate across time and through generations.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher Village Well Books & Coffee