Lessons in Attention

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.Praise for Lessons in Attention

“A seductive voice that knows all too well the foibles of the human heart.” —Ledia Xhoga, Booker Prize-longlisted author of Misinterpretation

“Jimin Kang’s Lessons in Attention is an ambitious debut. Kang reckons with translanguaging and the pressures of a post-multicultural world, asking what it means to be legible—what happens when the self cannot be translated in the spaces that matter most. Attuned to the frictions of migration and translation shaping this generation, the novel reveals that language, and people, are never lost—only waiting to be found again.” —E. J. Koh, author of The Liberators and The Magical Language of OthersJimin Kang is a writer, journalist, and scholar. Born in Seoul and raised in Hong Kong, she has also lived in Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the United States, where she is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature as a Knight-Hennessy scholar at Stanford. Her writing—ranging from fiction and essays to reviews and reportage—has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Kenyon Review, and Wasafiri, where she was a finalist for the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. Lessons in Attention is her first novel.