The Surrendered

By: Chang-Rae Lee

Narrated by: James Yaegashi

At the end of the Korean War, the lives of orphan June Han and American soldier Hector Brennan collide. Thirty years later, they meet again and are forced to come to terms with the secrets of their devastating past.

©2010 Chang-Rae Lee (P)2010 Recorded Books, LLC

Critic reviews

“Lee’s masterful fourth novel bursts with drama and human anguish as it documents the ravages and indelible effects of war.” ( Publishers Weekly)

"[C]ompletely engrossing story of great complexity and tragedy" ( Library Journal)

A sorrowful haunt, gorgeous storytelling!

What a story! The author pulls you in immediately, you don’t have have to work at it, slaving away to find the meat. It hits you right in the face and then binds you up in sorrow and the human fragility. A beautiful story, one that needed to be told. One of my most high recommends!

Engrossing Portrayal of the Effect of War

This book and the narrator are terrific despite the brutality of the content. Although I am familiar with the history of the conflicts between Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese in the 20th century and America's role in this complex part of the world, this fictional story vividly portrays the effect of war on civilians. I don't think that the average American reader has any idea how World War II and the Korean War affected people in those countries and how these effects continue to shape immigrants 50 years later. Chang- Rae Lee's prose is stunning, particularly in an audio book format. This is one of my favorites from Audible

Miserable

First few chapters were great. Everything else is a horny mess. Stay away from this book!

YAWN!

Try as I may, in the end I did not care about the characters. I did get to the end but asked myself why??? Perhaps I missed the point. My wife asked if she should read The Surrendered.... ahhh...NO.

this bibliophile could not finish this book

I had such high hopes for this book. I love reading historical fiction, especially works about colonialism and Asia, so I jumped at the chance to listen a novel about the Korean War. But I became frustrated by the tired tropes of the novel, the melodramatic tone of the narrator, and the unsympathetic characters and unrealistic plot. I was about two hours from the end of the book, when the tension should have been building to a climax, when I made the decision to stop listening. I rarely abandon books, especially when I'm so far from the end, but I had stopped caring about what happened to the characters and it was a painful listen. The narrator sounded like he was narrating crime fiction, which didn't help my opinion of the book.

Save yourself the trouble, a total disappointment

This makes me sad to write since I've met the author, Chang-rae Lee, a man who couldn't have been more kind and charming or humble. But his book, The Surrendered, is simply awful. Firstly, the book desperately needs a team of editors to steer Lee back to its myriad flaws needing repair. It's missing many details essential to the story, pieces which are astonishingly left out. I've never listened to or read a book in which so many words are just made up, nouns and verbs turned into adjectives and adverbs seemingly out of convenience to the author. And the reuse of the same words over and over--he must have used "welling" in 10 different ways 30 different times.

The story line is unbelievable, even for historical, wartime fiction, and I'm not talking about the brutality of the combatants. There's not a single happy character in the lot, and the one who comes closest is a drug addict. As one other reviewer put it, Lee's use of tropes is just nauseating. I can't tell if he's trying too hard to impress readers or himself by twisting every description into something symbolic and deep, or whether he just can't make himself write cleanly and concisely.

The narrator needs to find a new line of work. He was just not good in any way, shape or form. I know that sounds mean, but it's the truth, I'm sorry to say.

To think that this book is up for a Pulitzer Prize is purely astonishing. It's such a bad nomination that it makes me think so much less of the Pulitzer Prize itself--a marker by which I've often bought books. Just as shocking is the fact that Lee is a professor of literature at Princeton! Who knows? Maybe he teaches better than he writes.

Unlike the other reviewer who simply gave up on the book, I finished it out of respect to Lee and the fact that I paid for it. Frankly I wish I'd bailed out, because the ending was not even close to being worth it. Sorry, Chang-Rae, you're a very nice man, but I can't imagine letting anyone else read this book without fair warning

Really. Bad. Book.

Wooden characters, badly written, excruciating narrator - this book has it all. I was curious about this writer and gave it a listen, but it's the last novel I'll read by him. The characters aren't developed in an intelligent way; they're simply your basic cast of damaged humans and that's that. There's the odd accident and death, and the author doesn't take the time or ink to delve into the grief of his characters. Really? Hector wasn't just a little sad when his lover died? He just hopped on a plane to Italy and got over it? The dialogue between characters is so painfully written that I almost left the novel several times. If I hadn't paid for the book, I wouldn't have bothered to finish it. It's the first time in my life that I wished I'd ordered a Danielle Steel novel instead.