Tender Age

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a story of guilt, innocence, and a boy on the cusp of adolescence

A spellbinding exploration of American masculinity and family dynamics as seen through the confused eyes of a prepubescent child of immigrants, A Tender Age joins the rich tradition of the American bildungsroman. The natural descendent of characters like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caufield, Korean-American Jeon-Gi is torn between competing ideas of himself. At home, his working-class parents dote on him. Outside, he is part of a roving pack of kids with dominion over a derelict baseball field, weedy parking lot, and rusty jungle gym. Getting into and out of trouble is all-consuming. But the summer he turns eleven, he becomes embroiled in a staggering series of events reverberating far beyond himself and his family.

Devastating in its emotional precision, A Tender Age captures a family and community in striking distance of the American dream, and a young person on the precipice of adult knowledge, looking at his own culpability and looking away—then thinking about it for the rest of his life. 

“Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee?”—The Los Angeles Times

"He has redefined not only what it means to be American, but the fabric of the Great American Novel itself." —Jhumpa Lahiri

Author: Chang-rae Lee
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Page Count: 368pp
Size: 5.75 x 8.5 x 1.25
Notes: hardcover
Release Date: August 11, 2026
ISBN: 979-8217048441