
A Tender Age
A Novel
Chang-Rae Lee(Author)
Riverhead Books,U.S. (Publisher)
Will be published approx. on 11. August 2026
Book
Hardback
368 pages
979-8-217-04844-1 (ISBN)
Description
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2026 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE BOSTON GLOBE, GOODREADS, AND LITERARY HUB
“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
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
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.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Publishing group
Penguin Putnam Inc
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 210 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
458 gr
ISBN-13
979-8-217-04844-1 (9798217048441)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Person
Chang-rae Lee is the author of six other novels, including Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A 2021 winner of the Award of Merit for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Chang-rae Lee teaches writing at Stanford University.