When a novel, particularly a debut novel, is referred to as “ambitious,” there’s usually an implicit “but” present. In Long for This World, Sonya Chung takes on the dynamics of family—what draws it together and what pulls it apart—through the eyes of a number of players, male and female, old and young, Korean and Korean-American. Both her subject matter and her approach are ambitious, to say the least. The only “but” in my reaction, however, is but she pulls it off—and admirably.

Long for This World is the story of the Han family, beginning with the elders: Han Jae-kyu and his older brother Han Hyun-kyu, who immigrated to the United States as a teenager. Both are now physicians, middle-aged with grown children and a web of in-laws, both married to women so deeply invested in their own versions of reality they barely see the husbands and children behind the constructs. When Han Hyun-kyu abruptly bolts from his life in New York and turns up on his brother’s doorstep in Korea, his daughter Ah-Jin—Jane—follows to check up on him. She’s a war photographer, already a veteran in her 30s, and has made decisiveness a way of life: “You have exactly one second to think, not a moment more (or less)… you always and immediately run toward the danger, but never at full speed.” So Jane, brave but lost, leaves her brother Henry—a year out of rehab, lost but brave—and runs toward Korea. There she finds not only her father and uncle but her aunt; her pregnant, disconnected cousin; and her aunt’s brother, a restless and successful artist building a studio on their property. Family: danger of a different sort.

The idea of the family as a tapestry is an old one, but that’s precisely what works to give this novel its texture. Each member of the clan, as we meet them at different times in their lives, fills in a detail here, provides a clue there. The whole, though, remains beyond any easy definition. Long for This World is all about the threads, the small moments and interactions that attract and repel, and Chung has done a fine job of rendering the complexities.

Woven deeply into the theme of family here are the ways we leave each other and are left behind in turn. Husbands leave wives, children leave their parents, siblings leave each other’s sides. Long before she leaves Henry to chase their father to Korea, as a child Jane abandoned him in the woods—less out of maliciousness than an odd curiosity: “I can see him now, absorbed in his play, sweaty and flushed, foggy-headed from the heat. I can feel the distance between us, then and now, how he ceased to be Henry to me, my brother. How I saw him as a thing—an experiment, an idea. I snapped his image with my eyes…. And I left him.” No one’s motives are simple in all this coming and going.

The novel is heavy with loss as well, from adult deaths to the quiet, wrenching slipping away of the unborn, and no one gets away intact. The formidable Dr. Lee, Jane and Henry’s mother—this is how they refer to her, which tells us plenty—is relied on to counsel couples who have lost a pregnancy. Yet she rides roughshod over her own children, barely seeing them, speaking “in loops: from herself, about herself, to herself.” And Han Jae-kyu’s wife, Han Jung-joo, is so preoccupied with the careful order of her life that she doesn’t notice her husband and daughter drifting in their own directions.

In fact variations on seeing, and being seen, figure deeply in the narrative. After all, what is more intrinsic to the idea of family? On the one hand kinship involves intrusive scrutiny, and on the other a blinding familiarity. “One minute you are the image in the telescope, you are so close that you are inside…. The next minute you are the viewer, you are standing at a remote, zooming in, drawing the image as close as possible, and yet knowing that what you see, what you long to see in detail and immediacy, is ever and always far, far away.” It’s no accident that Jane, a photographer whose earliest memories are of framing the world through a viewfinder, allies herself with her aunt’s brother Chae Min-suk, an artist whose formulaic success has distanced him from his own work.

There is a lot going on here, but it works. Chung balances multiple time frames and points of view well, the voices identifiable without resorting to a shorthand of quirks. She even manages to discern between the English and Korean speakers with a slight, elegant change of tone—the difference between linguistically formal and informal languages is clear but not didactic. In fact, her touch is light throughout, and her ear is good. Most important, she doesn’t succumb to the urge to pathologize her characters. They’re allowed to be more than their stories, and by the novel’s end we truly care for them, both the casualties and the survivors—those who weren’t long for this world and those who are. This is a skillful and heartfelt debut, and Sonya Chung is definitely one of the latter.