The Last Story of Mina Lee

When twenty-six-year-old Margot Lee can't reach her mother, she drives down to the Koreatown apartment where she grew up — and finds that Mina has died, alone and under circumstances that don't add up. Grief quickly tangles with mystery as Margot begins to sift through her mother's belongings and history, discovering how little she ever really knew about the woman who raised her: a Korean War orphan and undocumented immigrant who built a precarious life in Los Angeles almost entirely out of view.

Braided through Margot's present-day search is Mina's own story, decades earlier, during her first year in America — scraping by stocking shelves at a Korean grocery store, and, against all her expectations, falling in love. That fateful relationship sets in motion a chain of events whose consequences reach all the way to the night of her death.

A Reese's Book Club pick and bestselling debut, Nancy Jooyoun Kim's The Last Story of Mina Lee is a moving dual-timeline novel about immigration, secrets, and the unbridgeable distances that can open between a mother and a daughter.