Lessons in Attention: A Novel

Jimin Kang’s stunning debut novel about grief, faith, and what it means to belong to a place and other people

When Toby Burton, an Oxford-born philosophy student, goes missing on a research trip in Brazil, his friend Lua Oliveira—a Brazilian translator recently moved to England from America—is forced to confront her involvement in his disappearance.

As Lua’s Korean American ex-boyfriend Elias arrives in Oxford to support the search, Lua begrudgingly enlists the help not only of the local Quaker community but her estranged mother, a retired diplomat-turned-evangelical Christian in São Paulo.

Lessons in Attention explores themes of faith, belonging, translation, and the meaning of attention, raising the question of how thoroughly we know the people we love—if we choose to see them fully at all.