The End of August

About

In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, a young man leaves his village and crosses the sea to Japan, beginning a multi-generational story of a Korean family navigating colonialism, war, displacement, and the long aftermath of occupation. The narrative moves across decades and continents, following the family's descendants as they build lives in a country that considers them permanent outsiders. Yu Miri, whose Tokyo Ueno Station won the National Book Award, draws on her own family history to write an epic that is both deeply personal and historically sweeping. The novel traces the intimate costs of empire — not in battles and treaties but in the daily negotiations of identity, language, and belonging. A family saga that spans a century of upheaval — and the discovery that home is not a place but an argument that never ends.