Jeonga’s narration is sharp and witty and a touch sly as she describes her present, disembodied state — the in-between, purgatory-like space her consciousness now occupies — as well as the events that led to her death. A few days before her death, Jeonga is living in an apartment in Seoul when her 110-year-old sister, Mina, receives a letter from Ohio, prompting them and their 108-year-old sister, Aera, to travel there to prevent secrets, hidden for generations, from being revealed. Along their journey — filled with darkly humorous bickering, worrying over anti-aging skin care and designer clothes, and their competitiveness about their children’s accomplishments — the sisters reveal how their fourth sister Seona’s disappearance from their lives 89 years earlier has affected them in different ways. “Seona is the only one who lived the way she wanted,” Mina says, “the happiest of us all.” But Jeonga has “never gotten over how Seona herself and her daughter had not come south during the Korean War,” Han writes. The consequences of Seona’s decision reverberate for generations, beginning with their businessman father’s premature death six months later.

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Persons: Jimin, Brown, Jeonga, Mina, —, Seona, ” Mina, ” Han, father’s Locations: South Korea, United States, Seoul, Ohio