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Homeseeking

An epic and intimate tale of how a single choice can define a lifetime

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Homeseeking

By: Karissa Chen
Narrated by: Katharine Chin, Kenneth Lee
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About this listen

'[Homeseeking] weaves expertly between present and past, telling the story of childhood sweethearts who meet again late in life and are torn between looking back and moving on' - Celeste Ng

'A love story in more ways than one, Homeseeking is a beautiful, nuanced look at Chinese history, family, young love, and the wisdom of age' - Vanessa Chan

There are moments when a single choice can define an entire life. Haiwen and Suchi are teenage sweethearts in 1940s Shanghai; their childhood friendship has blossomed into young love, and they believe that they are soulmates. But when Haiwen secretly decides to enlist in the army to keep his brother from the draft, their shared future is shattered. Their paths take them far afield from each other, with the exception of one pivotal chance encounter on the Hong Kong ferry in 1966.

Sixty years later, Haiwen, now in his late seventies, is bagging bananas at a 99 Ranch in Los Angeles when he lifts his head to once more see Suchi. As they begin to rekindle their friendship, it feels like they might have a second chance to live the life they were supposed to have together. But the weight of the past lives with them at every moment, and only time will tell if they are able to forge something new.

Told in alternating narratives, Homeseeking spans seven decades, through the most tumultuous period of modern Chinese history up to contemporary times, tracing the separated lovers as they migrate from Shanghai to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and America.

©2025 Karissa Chen (P)2025 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
20th Century Historical Fiction Literary Fiction
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Critic reviews

Sweeping, epic, yet deeply intimate, Homeseeking traces a pair of first loves and the gossamer thread that binds them across six decades and four nations as the world splits them apart, again and again. A spellbinding meditation on family, immigration, and the many faces of courage in times of hardship, this is a dazzling debut. (Kirstin Chen, New York Times bestselling author of Counterfeit)
An absolute stunner of a debut. Chen nimbly tackles too often overlooked history in an exploration of surviving the trauma of war and loss of home. Homeseeking is a novel that asks if those who survive by moving forward and those who sustain by looking back can ever truly meet. (Erika Swyler, author of The Book of Speculation)
A love story in more ways than one, Homeseeking is a beautiful, nuanced look at Chinese history, family, young love, and the wisdom of age. As Suchi and Haiwen do their best to survive their lives, we follow them across the circumstances and choices that continually separate them, and bring them back together - even as their worlds keep changing. By the end I was in tears. Remarkable (Vanessa Chan, author of The Storm We Made)
Homeseeking is a perfect love song, beautiful and poignant and tender and sad. A tour de force of storytelling and a book with real faith in the human heart, with all its immense capacity for both love and hatred. Read it. It will make time stand still. Karissa Chen is the writer we've been waiting for, and Homeseeking is a must read (Matthew Salesses, author of The Sense of Wonder)
Through its glittering and heartrending depictions of war, forced movement, broken love stories, and the tumultuous Chinese-Taiwanese 20th century, this spellbinding debut ingeniously captures the paradox of the immigrant experience: doggedly looking forward while uncontrollably looking back. (Juliet Grames, author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna)
Epic, assured, and beautifully drawn, Homeseeking is a love story that reveals the effects of war and history on the lives of individuals. Karissa Chen has created a world that's deeply absorbing, following Suchi and Haiwen across decades, borders, and lifetimes (Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers)
In Homeseeking, Karissa Chen brings a rare delicacy to the pain of history, exploring what it means for generations to be simultaneously imprisoned by and separated from the past. Her characters linger with desperate vividness in each other's memories - as they long will in her readers' imaginations (Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian)

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