The Table We Came Back To – Paperback

At Sun-ae’s Restaurant, feeding people is how one widowed mother keeps her family together.

Behind a Korean market, Sun-ae raises three sons on long working days, generous bowls of rice, and the hope that their lives will be easier than hers. Each boy grows up determined to protect her. Each chooses a different way.

Do-yoon, the eldest, trusts his fists until violence drives him toward a mountain temple. Do-hyun, the second, believes success can repay every sacrifice, until a crisis of conscience leads him toward the church. The youngest, Do-gyeom, stays. Between an ordinary office job and his mother’s kitchen, he tends to the small necessities that no one else sees.

As the years pass, staying begins to cost him more than he can admit. When redevelopment threatens the restaurant and their mother’s strength falters, the brothers must face what their choices have asked of one another. Do-gyeom has a question of his own: where is there room for the life he wants?

The Table We Came Back To is a contemporary family novel set in Korea, about brothers finding their way back to one another, the work of caring for an aging parent, and learning to accept love without giving up a life of one’s own.