The Latehomecomer

One Hmong family’s harrowing escape from war in Laos to the uncertainty of a new home as refugees in Minnesota.

Yang’s award-winning memoir of her family’s harrowing escape from war in Laos is a love letter to her grandmother, a troubling portrait of the consequences of us intervention in Southeast Asia, and a glimpse into the little-seen exodus of the Hmong people, first to refugee camps in Thailand and then, for many, to new homes in Minnesota.

Publication date: January 1, 2017

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 312 pages

ISBN: 9781566894784

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Kao Kalia Yang is a teacher, public speaker, and writer. Yang is the author of the award-winning book The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir (Coffee House Press, 2008) and the book The Song Poet (Metropolitan Books, 2016). She is a graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Yang lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her family.

Winner of the 2009 Minnesota Book Award

Winner of a Readers Choice Award

Winner of the 2008 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award

An NEA Big Read selection

“This is the best account of the Hmong experience I’ve ever read—powerful, heartbreaking, and unforgettable.”

—Anne Fadiman

“Packed with the stuff of life.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Yang tells her family’s story with grace; she narrates their struggles, beautifully weaving in Hmong folklore and culture.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“A natural storyteller. Yang chronicles her family’s journey and draws the reader into the Hmong culture.”

—Library Journal, starred review

“[Yang] tells her family’s story with outstanding beauty and lyricism.”

—St. Paul Pioneer Press

“Yang intimately chronicles the immigrant experience from the Hmong perspective, providing a long-overdue contribution to the history and literature of ethnic America.”

—Booklist

“This memoir is the first of its kind to correctly chronicle the lives of [the] Hmong.”

—International Examiner

“An ode to the thousands of Hmong families in our metro. . . . This is among the most important Minnesota books.”

—Metro Magazine

“Splendorous. . . . [Yang] forces the reader to question memory, power, and authority in America.”

—Feminist Review

"Yang’s love and devotion to her family and the Hmong people shines on every page. . . . A necessary read about the human experience.”

—Hmong Times

“The Latehomecomer is a wonderful journey into the very personal experiences of its author, and it is also a story about so many of us. Reading this book is about experiencing the Hmong American transformation.”

—Mee Moua, MN State Senator

“Across jungles, refugee camps, and oceans, The Latehomecomer is a journey to the center of everything: one’s fast-held understanding of home.”

—Cris Beam

“Yang has fashioned a bittersweet and engrossing epic that is mythic in its beauty, tenderness, and power.”

—Honor Moore

“An impressive debut by a writer with an enchanting voice, The Latehomecomer reveals all that is worth knowing about endurance, the power of a family’s love, and hope in the face of desperation.”

—Patricia O’Toole