A radiant, exquisitely told portrait of a young woman growing up between cultures in search of her future self.
Before you are anything, you are a daughter.
At first, you are a child at home in your mother's belly: a beloved daughter, a vision of the future. But who will you become? At the Dol ceremony on your first birthday, dressed in a bright fuchsia hanbok, your family gather round to see which item you'll reach for that will determine the course of your life. You choose the pencil.
As your family moves from Seoul to snowy Minnesota, you and your mother find yourself in a new American life that you must navigate together, mastering its language and customs. Soon enough, you are in pursuit of perfection-your mother marshalling you through a childhood of achievements to shape you into the person she most wants you to be. But you are not just your mother's daughter, despite her sacrifices. As the years go by, you want to build a life between these two cultures that feels yours-an identity that lies somewhere in between your homeland and motherland.
Told in incandescent prose, Cay Kim's debut novel is a portrait of a brilliant young woman growing up between worlds, and a glorious love letter to girlhood, family, and the great dreams we hold for ourselves, no matter where we're from. "Timeless, taut, and daringly tempestuous . . . The Future Perfect is an indelibly shrewd and scorchingly beautiful read. This is a masterful and unforgettable debut."-Paul Beatty, author of the Man Booker Prize–winning The Sellout
"A book I have been waiting for all my life. Cay Kim has written a daring, sonic, incandescent debut, full of verve and heartache. A story about the pain and love between daughters and mothers, the deep gulf between desire and duty, and the particular experience of straddling both Korean and American homelands, this is a magnificent debut."-Crystal Hana Kim, author of The Stone Home and If You Leave Me
"Intense, lyrical, heartfelt. A restless immigrant narrative that does not provide easy answers, The Future Perfect explores the tensions of identity in its use of languages that inform, overlap, contradict, and enrich each other. Written with gorgeous attention to detail and a sense of wonder. A beauty."-Yoon Choi, winner of the Whiting Award and author of Skinship
"A lyrically profound and triumphant coming-of-age novel that examines the interdependence between exceptionalism and extreme self-denial, through the eyes of a daughter caught between nations and her mother's sacrifice and erasure. The precise and loving attention to language reconstructs a painful past to imagine a future that burns with the ineffability of being wholly alive-and present."-Nancy Jooyoun Kim, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Story of Mina Lee, a Reese's Book Club Pick Cay Kim received her B.A. from Stanford University, where she won the Stanford University Urmy Hardy Poetry Prize, and her M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in Granta. She lives in Seoul, South Korea, and New York City. This is her first novel.
