A radiant portrait of a young woman caught between cultures, and what is lost and found in the struggle to succeed.
THE FUTURE PERFECT: A Novel
by Cay Kim
Riverhead, June 2026
(via The Gernert Company)
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.
“A book I have been waiting for all my life. Cay Kim has written a daring, sonic, incandescent debut, full of verve and heartache. A story about the pain and love between daughters and mothers, the deep gulf between desire and duty, and the particular experience of straddling both Korean and American homelands, this is a magnificent debut.” —Crystal Hana Kim, author of The Stone Home and If You Leave Me
“Timeless, taut, and daringly tempestuous . . . A masterful and unforgettable debut.” —Paul Beatty, author of the Booker Prize–winning The Sellout
« Elegant and deeply felt, this is a novel full of poise, precision and luminous prose. An assured debut. » —Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown
“Intense, lyrical, heartfelt . . . Written with gorgeous attention to detail and a sense of wonder. A beauty.” —Yoon Choi, winner of the Whiting Award and author of Skinship
“A lyrically profound and triumphant coming-of-age novel.” —Nancy Jooyoun Kim, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Story of Mina Lee, a Reese’s Book Club Pick
“A masterpiece of concision and nuance, a searing picture of what it is to grow up between cultures. » —Joshua Furst, author of Revolutionaries
Cay Kim was born in Seoul in 1998. She received her BA from Stanford University, where she won the Urmy/Hardy Poetry Prize, and her MFA from Columbia University. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta and One Story. This is her first novel.
In 2024, Nina’s small-engine plane crashes into a lake in the Wyoming mountains. Her boyfriend Ben, who was flying it, is nowhere to be found. Lost and freezing on the shore, Nina is armed with only a few old energy bars, a phone with no service, and a vague hope of rescue. It is up to her to survive in the vast wilderness. But then she stumbles upon Sunrise—a town of the Old West that is strangely well-maintained, but seemingly abandoned. A place that holds the missing link to a ghost story 100 years in the making.