about Famous Adopted People - the debut nOvel from Alice Stephens

Adoptees Lisa and Mindy are best friends whose childhood hobby of collecting the biographies of famous adopted people has continued into adulthood, even as their lives take different paths. Now in their late twenties, Mindy convinces Lisa to meet in South Korea to search for their birth mothers. But Lisa isn’t in a good place. She's been teaching English in Japan and the situation there―thanks mostly to her impulsive, hard-partying ways―has become problematic.

After a possible friendship-ending fight with Mindy in Seoul, and with a return to Japan no longer advisable, Lisa is running out of options. Refusing to come to terms with her life, she embarks on a drinking binge with Harrison, the extraordinarily handsome fixer from MotherFinder’s, the agency that helps adoptees find their birth parents. Things quickly go from drunken to surreal; and Lisa wakes up to find herself in the strangest and cruelest place on earth: North Korea.

Trapped inside a palatial mountain compound, Lisa is held captive by a glamorous, surgically-enhanced blonde named Honey. Honey’s world is populated by a cast of international misfits―a South African personal assistant, a Russian doctor, a Japanese chef, two American defectors, and others―all loitering in extravagant imprisonment. Forced to come to terms with why she is there, Lisa must also confront Honey’s true identity, while finding her own among the wreckage of her life.

Debut novelist Alice Stephens combines dark humor and a keen wit to examine the profound implications of not knowing where you come from; and how our perceptions of an unknown world actually reflect deeper truths about our own.