The Last Story of Mina Lee

Margot returns to her mother’s Koreatown apartment to find her dead, and realises how little she knew about a woman she saw as only a difficult immigrant parent. Alternating chapters follow Mina’s own arrival in Los Angeles decades earlier, working a supermarket job and building a life Margot never heard about. Kim writes the specific loneliness of a daughter who never learned enough of her mother’s language to ask the real questions.