A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Long-listed for the 2023 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
Short-listed for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award
An APALA Adult Fiction Honor Book
2024 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award
Counterpoint Press, JUNE 7, 2022 (out now in Paperback)
Available at*: Indiebound | Bookshop.org | Barnes & Noble | Amazon
Things are looking up for Mr. and Mrs. Cho. Their dream of franchising their Korean plate lunch restaurants across Hawaiʻi seems within reach after a visit from Guy Fieri boosts the profile of Cho’s Delicatessen. Their daughter, Grace, is busy finishing her senior year of college and working for her parents, while her older brother, Jacob, just moved to Seoul to teach English. But when a viral video shows Jacob trying—and failing—to cross the Korean demilitarized zone, nothing can protect the family from suspicion and the restaurant from waning sales.
No one knows that Jacob has been possessed by the ghost of his lost grandfather, who feverishly wishes to cross the divide and find the family he left behind in the north. As Jacob is detained by the South Korean government, Mr. and Mrs. Cho fear their son won’t ever be able to return home, and Grace gets more and more stoned as she negotiates her family’s undoing. Struggling with what they don’t know about themselves and one another, the Chos must confront the separations that have endured in their family for decades.
Set in the months leading up to the 2018 false missile alert in Hawaiʻi, Joseph Han’s profoundly funny and strikingly beautiful debut novel is an offering that aches with histories inherited and reunions missed, asking how we heal in the face of what we forget and who we remember.
*With every purchase, 20% of the author’s book royalties will be donated to Hoʻoulu ʻĀina (Kōkua Kalihi Valley).
Publishers Weekly’s Writer to Watch Spring 2022
A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year
An LGBTQ Reads Most Anticipated Book
Goodreads, A Most Anticipated Debut Novel of 2022
Debutiful, Best Debut Books of 2022
NPR, Best Book of 2022
Time, 100 Must-Read Books of 2022
“You’d have to visit Cirque du Soleil to see someone juggle as much as Han with such effortless dexterity and tenderness . . . Rhythmic and hypnotic; it captivates from the very first page and gracefully conveys the loss and the longing the family experiences.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Tragic, funny, and strikingly ingenious, Han’s prodigious debut is a spectacular achievement. Seamlessly dovetailed into his sublime multigenerational saga are pivotal history lessons, anti-colonial denunciations, political slaps. For Korean speakers, Han’s brilliant linguistic acrobatics will prove particularly enlightening (Jeong is a homophone for jeong, something akin to empathic connection) and shrewdly entertaining.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Han makes a smashing debut with this stunning take on identity and migration told through the multiple perspectives of a Korean American family . . . [W]hile it’s heartbreaking, it’s also sharply hilarious . . . This is a master class from a brilliant new voice.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Han’s surreal fantasy, sometimes devolving into slapstick, contains a serious critique: of the marginalization of Korean immigrants; of the plight of families separated by a politically contrived border; of shattered lives, pain, and guilt. A raucous and adroit debut.” —Kirkus Reviews
“One of the most original novels I’ve read in the last decade. Nuclear Family imagines a story of the lives of our Korean ancestors in the present tense, their ghost life as full of urgency, politics and complication as our own. How far does the separation at the 38th Parallel go?, Han asks. All the way into the land of spirit, a wound for the living and the dead.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“A haunting, tender, potent, and frequently very funny testament to the pull of history and the tenacity of ghosts. Spellbinding and original, Nuclear Family is a novel to hold close.” —R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
“Told in fervent, hilarious prose, Joseph Han’s Nuclear Family is a sweeping and singular novel about the long shadows that war casts over migrants and about how, in its aftermath, life becomes forever touched by the uncanny logic of its violence. This is a novel for the living, the dead, the living-dead, and everyone in between.” —Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, author of Savage Tongues, 2022 National Book Foundation 5 under 35 judge
“Nuclear Family is a world unto itself: Joseph Han’s novel is heartfelt and propulsive, immersing readers in a narrative whose questions of family, borders, queerness, and forgiveness constantly surprises and astounds. Han’s prose is remarkable—both deadpan and compassionate—juggling the stories that we’re told with the ones we seek to tell ourselves. Nuclear Family is a singular work, and Han’s writing is truly special.” —Bryan Washington, author of Memorial and Lot
“Nuclear Family is a rollicking, immersive family saga unlike any you’ve read before, a novel that explores the intergenerational legacy of trauma—and what it costs us to both survive and remember—while also delivering more than its share of laughs. Deft, candid, and perpetually surprising, Joseph Han’s debut is one not to miss.” —Nicole Chung, author of All You Can Ever Know
"Joseph Han is a new voice that enriches the landscape of American literature. Nuclear Family continually surprises and moves with a grace and breadth beyond most debut novels. It boldly, compassionately reimagines the thirty-eighth parallel dividing North and South Korea and the lives of immigrant families with an innovative plot that is entirely Han's own." —Krys Lee, author of How I Became a North Korean
“Joseph Han’s Nuclear Family is a moving exploration of the losses we inherit, the continual violence of borders, and the embodiedness of history. He shows us that what is so powerful and resurrective about mythmaking is not that it provides an escape from our world but that it allows us to see the deeper truths of it, to give agency to the buried, and to shape possibility across space and time and generations. Han writes with incredible empathy for the living and the dead, subverting borders of all kinds to illuminate intergenerational dynamics, labor, and the living marrow of memory.” —K-Ming Chang, author of Bestiary
“Han will draw you in with his dry, slacker humor, his playful references to weed and Guy Fieri, but he will keep you reading with his heartfelt determination to tell a family saga that holds nothing back. Nuclear Family is about borders, both imposed and self-created, the family history and trauma we try to outrun, what happens when we inevitably fail to. A debut filled with ghosts that manages to still be so very alive.” —Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl
“Nuclear Family manages to capture Hawaiʻi, North and South Korea, Guy Fieri and family-run delicatessens, teenage gloom, the weight of our family and ancestors, and settle them all onto an appetizing plate. A fresh, inventive, and at times, hilarious novel.” —Kaui Hart Hemmings, author of The Descendants
“The Korean Demilitarized Zone is one of the most militarized borders in the world. A division created by US and Soviet forces after World War II, following the 35-year-long Japanese occupation of Korea. It is harder to weigh a complicated history of war that permanently exiles its victims. Joseph Han’s Nuclear Family follows the perpetual victims of war who must continue to respond and learn to live through and within such a world—nevertheless.” —E. J. Koh, author of The Magical Language of Others and A Lesser Love