On Such A Full Sea: A Novel

"There’s been a lot of traffic in dystopias recently, but when a great literary novelist takes on the genre, it’s worth paying close attention. Chang-rae Lee’s On Such A Full Sea is a desolate vision of the future, which begins in the former Baltimore, now known as B-mor. A young woman named Fan sets off in search of her vanished lover, across a highly stratified society, strange and immoral. Lee’s writing is gorgeous and the literary device of a kind of Greek chorus — the community voice of B-Mor — feels fresh, but also timeless. Like most dystopias, the book is an allegory, but it never seems obvious or on-the-nose — it’s more like a fable, simple and cautionary — an important critique of a world we’ll hope we don’t see."