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Welcome to the Double X Book Club for Thursday, May 6th. My name is Hannah Rosen. I'm one of the co-editors of Double X. I'm here in Washington with the lovely Margaret Talbot from the New Yorker. Hi, Margaret. Hi, there, Hannah. And we have Emily Bazelon in New Haven. Hi, Emily. Hello. Hi, Emily. So today we're going to talk about Chang Reilly's new novel, which is called The Surrendered.

And the Surrendered is essentially a war novel about the Korean War.

And it focuses on three characters who meet in the war at an orphanage and sort of basically their lives before and after that point.

One of them is June, who's a sort of orphan. She's a young

girl, I think, of 11 when the book starts out. Another one, and she has different last

names, which is why I'm calling her by her first name throughout the book. There's another

character who's very important, whose name is Hector Brennan, and he is a soldier in the war,

and also sort of calls himself a failure

grand and total throughout. And then the third character is Sylvie Tanner, who's a missionary's

wife, and the three of them sort of meet in an orphanage in Korea during the war. So before we get

started about the first, the way the book opens, which is incredibly grisly, I just want to ask you guys, because I know a little bit what you thought about the book, because I absolutely love the book, but I don't get the sense that either of you loved it as much as I did. So, Margaret, why don't you go first and sort of say a little bit about just what you thought of the book? He's a wonderful writer and it's a very powerful story.

And the lead character in particular, I think, is a June or Hector, June, by whom I mean

June, is a kind of remarkable character and an unusual one in that she is just a force

of pure will who is often dislikable and does some quite immoral and immoral things, but is not an unsympathetic

character because she has been through this incredible harrowing experience and because

...