Cover design: Young Jin Lim
How do you find your place in a beautiful but troubled land?
Elinor Hanson, a forty-something former model, is struggling to reinvent herself as a freelance writer when she receives an unexpected assignment. Her mentor from grad school offers her a chance to write for a prestigious magazine about the Bakken oil boom in North Dakota. Elinor grew up near the Bakken, raised by an overbearing father and a distant Korean mother who met and married when he was stationed overseas. After decades away from home, Elinor returns to a landscape she hardly recognizes, overrun by tens of thousands of newcomers. Surrounded by roughnecks seeking their fortunes in oil and long-time residents worried about their changing community, Elinor experiences a profound sense of alienation and grief. She rages at the unrelenting male gaze, the locals who still see her as a foreigner, and the memories of her family’s estrangement after her mother decided to escape her unhappy marriage, leaving Elinor and her sister behind. The longer she pursues this potentially career-altering assignment, the more her past intertwines with the story she’s trying to tell, revealing disturbing new realities that will forever change her and the way she looks at the world.
“Jung Yun’s powerful new novel O Beautiful asks provocative questions as it interrogates the meaning and burden of beauty, from individual to nation. The choices that women make―or have made for them―are a treacherous territory of decisions concerning power and privilege. O Beautiful will make you think and see anew the strangeness and complexity of race, class, and gender in this page-turning, tender novel that journeys into the heart of America.”
“No one laces a scene with menace or fits more emotional range onto the page than Jung Yun. While serving as a snapshot of our contemporary moment, O Beautiful opens us up to the expanse of a woman’s life while walking us through the fast-moving and deeply devastating days of a community’s unwinding. With her dangerous yet graceful new novel, Jung Yun proves herself to be a writer who can rip out your broken heart and then repair it before your eyes.”
Photos by Jung (2008 - 2018)