O Beautiful — Jung Yun

In this deeply moving novel, a Korean American woman confronts her tumultuous past and the fraught realities of a changing American heartland.

Elinor Hanson, a forty-something former model, receives an unexpected opportunity to write about the Bakken oil boom in North Dakota for a prestigious magazine. Returning to the landscape of her childhood, Elinor finds the region transformed beyond recognition, overrun by tens of thousands of fortune-seeking roughnecks. As a woman of Asian descent, Elinor experiences a profound sense of alienation, raging against the unrelenting male gaze and locals who still view her as an outsider.

Haunted by memories of her family's estrangement after her mother's desperate attempt to escape an unhappy marriage, Elinor immerses herself in the story she's pursuing. But the deeper she delves, the more her own past intertwines with her reporting, forcing her to confront disturbing truths that will irrevocably change her and her perception of the world.

With spare and graceful prose, Jung Yun's O Beautiful presents an unflinching portrait of a community rife with tensions and competing interests, and one woman's quest for understanding and redemption in a place she once called home. This New York Times Editors' Choice novel offers a poignant exploration of identity, belonging, and the enduring scars of family trauma.