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  • Published: 16 May 2023
  • ISBN: 9781685890346
  • Imprint: Melville House
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $69.99

Flux





  • A New York Times Editor’s Choice
  • Best Book of 2023 by Esquire, Apple Books, HuffPost, GQ, Cosmopolitan, and Goodreads.
  • Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
  • VCU Cabell First Novelist Award

"Brazen, exhilarating, fun, and surprising! I couldn't predict where this novel was going, but I was definitely along for the ride." -- Ling Ma, author of Severance


A blazingly original and stylish debut novel about a young man  whose reality unravels when he suspects his employers have inadvertently discovered time travel and are covering up a string of violent crimes.

  • A New York Times Editor’s Choice
  • Best Book of 2023 by Esquire, Apple Books, HuffPost, GQ, Cosmopolitan, and Goodreads.
  • Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
  • VCU Cabell First Novelist Award

"Brazen, exhilarating, fun, and surprising! I couldn't predict where this novel was going, but I was definitely along for the ride." -- Ling Ma, author of Severance

A blazingly original and stylish debut novel about a young man whose reality unravels when he suspects his mysterious employers have inadvertently discovered time travel—and are using it to cover up a string of violent crimes . . .
 
Four days before Christmas, 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, 28-year-old Brandon loses his job after a hostile takeover of his big-media employer, and 48-year-old Blue, a key witness in a criminal trial against an infamous now-defunct tech startup, struggles to reconnect with his family.
 
So begins Jinwoo Chong’s dazzling, time-bending debut that blends elements of neo-noir and speculative fiction as the lives of Bo, Brandon, and Blue begin to intersect, uncovering a vast network of secrets and an experimental technology that threatens to upend life itself. Intertwined with them is the saga of an iconic ’80s detective show, Raider, whose star actor has imploded spectacularly after revelations of long-term, concealed abuse.
 
Flux is a haunting and sometimes shocking exploration of the cyclical nature of grief, of moving past trauma, and of the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America.

  • Published: 16 May 2023
  • ISBN: 9781685890346
  • Imprint: Melville House
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $69.99

About the author

Jinwoo Chong

Jinwoo Chong is the author of the novel Flux, a New York Times Editors’ Choice that was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and named a best book of 2023 by Esquire, Apple Books, HuffPost, GQ, Cosmopolitan, and Goodreads. His short stories and other work have appeared widely in print and online. I Leave It Up to You is his second novel.

Praise for Flux

Flux is a powerful debut – deft and fluid, sharp and dreamy. Employing the vehicle of a breakneck sci-fi thriller, Jinwoo Chong explores interstitial spaces of ethnicity, sexuality, trauma, pop cultural memory and, finally, time itself, with wit, tenderness and alacrity. The result is provocative and deeply moving. - Sam Lipsyte, author of Venus Drive

A smart and stylish addition to the tech thriller genre with interesting things to say about family, society and, indeed, reality itself. - Gary Shteyngart, author of Little Failure

Alluringly seductive and highly imaginative, reading Flux was like puzzling out a mystery always two steps ahead of me that I didn’t want to end. Chong has written an intricately layered and boldly cinematic debut that interrogates how the past collides with the present, and how our choices are bound up in not just who we wished we were, but who we dare to be. At once mind-bending yet grounded in timeless questions about forgiveness and hope, Flux is a kaleidoscope of a novel. - Elaine Hsieh Chou, Disorientation

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