A first novel of astonishing force, craft and beauty, The Headmaster's Wager conjures up a dizzyingly evocative wartime Saigon in the story of Percival Chen, a Chinese schoolmaster in Vietnam. This extraordinary book made me weep. Read it.

What wonderful and haunting worlds Krys Lee illuminates-a goose for a goose father, a sympathetic wife made bold by her husband's infidelity- all facets of a Korea and a Korean America made new by this exciting writer's entrancing vision.

A first novel of astonishing force, craft and beauty, The Headmaster's Wager conjures up a dizzyingly evocative wartime Saigon in the story of Percival Chen, a Chinese schoolmaster in Vietnam. This extraordinary book made me weep. Read it.

And in the end, I think, we're all just trying to survive, aren't we?