A Tender Age is a spellbinding exploration of American masculinity and family dynamics as seen through the confused eyes of a prepubescent child of immigrants.
LitStackers! Get ready to add another title to your “TBR” list! A Tender Age by Chang-rae Lee is in presale and generating serious buzz. This novel from Riverhead Books | Penguin Random House set for publication Aug 11, 2026, has early readers buzzing. We’re here to show you what’s on the book cover, from the publisher’s official description to the early reviews that suggest this book is one you want to pre-order today. Here we go!
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In This Spotlight On A Tender Age
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About A Tender Age
Guilt, innocence, and a boy on the cusp of adolescence.
A Tender Age joins the rich tradition of the American bildungsroman. The natural descendent of characters like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caufield, Korean-American Jeon-Gi is torn between competing ideas of himself.
At home, his working-class parents dote on him. Outside, he is part of a roving pack of kids with dominion over a derelict baseball field, weedy parking lot, and rusty jungle gym. Getting into and out of trouble is all-consuming. But the summer he turns eleven, he becomes embroiled in a staggering series of events reverberating far beyond himself and his family.
Devastating in its emotional precision, A Tender Age captures a family and community in striking distance of the American dream, and a young person on the precipice of adult knowledge, looking at his own culpability and looking away—then thinking about it for the rest of his life.
The narrative sweep of A Tender Age is irresistible. Chang portrays his narrator, along with a cast of adolescent characters, with such verve, depth, and sparkle, from the minor scrapes of youth to larger questions of truth, goodness, and guilt.
A Tender Age is Chang at his perfect, boiled down essence. At just 350 pages, it reads with all the emotional and intellectual heft of his longer books. It is a mesmerizing feat of literary storytelling.
Praise for A Tender Age
[A] beautiful coming-of-age tale.”—The Boston Globe
“[Lee is] such a beautiful writer…Very evocative…rich and immersive.”—The New York Times Podcast, “The Book Review”
In A Tender Age, “Lee tracks his young protagonist’s brutal education in the perversity of life…with breathtaking nuance and literary artistry…Each detail in each stunning and dramatic scene is vital and clarion… highly charged and resonant.”—Booklist (starred review)
A Tender Age, “Lee’s striking latest…hits hard.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A Tender Age is “A melancholy, emotionally rich story of preadolescent struggles.”—Kirkus (starred review)
“I have no choice but to ask: Who is a greater novelist than Chang-rae Lee?”—The Los Angeles Times
“Nothing is rushed; nothing is overlooked… Lee understands that in art and in stories what is perhaps most valuable is not what can be explained but what can be felt.”—The Boston Globe
“The prose Chang-rae Lee writes is elliptical, riddling, poetic…beautifully made.”—The New Yorker
“[Chang-rae Lee] explores the fundamental human desires to be seen and to love.”—The Washington Post
“Lee’s writing style, as usual, is alive with wit and satiric social commentary… boisterous and fun.”—NPR, Fresh Air
About Chang-rae Lee, Author of A Tender Age
Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, as well as My Year Abroad, On Such a Full Sea, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A 2021 winner of the Award of Merit for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Chang-rae Lee teaches writing at Stanford University.
You can connect with Chang-rae Lee on Facebook.
Source: Publisher
Publisher: Riverhead Books | Penguin Random House
ISBN Hardcover 9798217048441
Pub Date Aug 11, 2026
LitStack Spots by Chang-rae Lee
We’ve spotted a few other titles you’ll definitely want to add to your TBR stack, including My Year Abroad by Chang-rae Lee, On Such A Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee, and A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee.
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As an affiliate of Bookshop.org, Malaprop’s, Books-A-Million, Audiobooks.com, Chirp, 2nd & Charles, Amazon, NameHero, Envato, and Place-It, LitStack may earn a commission—at no cost to you—when you purchase through our affiliate links. We appreciate the brands we work with, and also appreciate that using our affiliate links may help you find your next great read, a book or two or more, in whatever form, while simultaneously supporting LitStack. When you use our affiliate links, you help keep LitStack running—and for that, we thank you.
As a Bookshop, Malaprop’s, BAM, Barnes & Noble, Audiobooks.com, Amazon, and Envato affiliate, LitStack may earn a commission at no cost to you when you purchase products through our affiliate links.
