Native Speaker (novel)

Native Speaker (1995), author Chang-Rae Lee's debut novel, explores the life of a Korean-American man named Henry Park as he navigates his marriage and career as a spy. Native Speaker explores the themes of language, identity, and culture as an Asian-American, and is considered a literary fiction as well as a spy thriller. The novel won the 1996 PEN/Hemingway award for Best First Novel, and though not the first novel by a Korean American author to be published by a major American publisher (that honor belongs to East Goes West, by Younghill Kang, Scribner's, 1935 it is the first contemporary novel in that category, published by Riverhead Books.