Book Talk | Future Perfect by Cay Kim

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ABOUT THE BOOK

“A masterful and unforgettable debut.” —Paul Beatty

"Elegant and deeply felt." —Charles Yu

“A book I have been waiting for all my life.” —Crystal Hana Kim

A radiant portrait of a young woman caught between cultures, and what is lost and found in the struggle to succeed.

Before you are anything, you are a daughter.

At first you are at home inside your pregnant mother: a beloved daughter, a vision of the future. But who will you become?  

As your family moves back and forth between Korea and the United States, you find yourself caught between two countries. Prioritizing your future over her own happiness, your mother marshals you through a childhood of homework and violin practice and academic achievement to shape you into the person she most wants you to be. Is hers the ultimate form of love? And, despite her sacrifices, is there a world somewhere between your motherland and homeland that can feel like your own?  

Told in incandescent prose, Cay Kim’s exquisite debut novel is a portrait of a brilliant young woman growing up between cultures, and a love letter to girlhood, family, and the great dreams we hold for ourselves, no matter where we’re from.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cay Kim received her B.A. from Stanford University, where she won the Stanford University Urmy Hardy Poetry Prize, and her M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in Granta. She lives in Seoul, South Korea, and New York City. This is her first novel.

IN CONVERSATION WITH

Hannah Bae is a freelance journalist and nonfiction writer who is at work on a memoir about healing from childhood trauma and family estrangement. In 2024, she was a New York State Council on the Arts grantee in literature and a juror in nonfiction for The Kirkus Prize. She was the 2020 nonfiction winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a 2022 and 2021 Peter Taylor Fellow for The Kenyon Review Writers Workshops and a 2019 fellow at Asian American Writers’ Workshop.  She has been hired to teach creative writing for Indiana University’s Writers Conference, Kundiman, Kweli International Literary Festival, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and The Resort LIC. She has received residencies from the Ragdale Foundation, The Peter Bullough Foundation, The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow and The Sue-Je Lee Gage Sunlit Residency. Her work is forthcoming or has been published in books including No Contact (Catapult, 2026), Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times (Red Hen Press, 2026) and Our Red Book: Intimate Histories of Periods, Growing & Changing (Simon & Schuster, 2022). She lives in Brooklyn, NY.