A dreamy romp, Ahn Love opens with Margaret visiting her widowed father Sam Ahn for his ninetieth birthday. His crippling loneliness – marked by a conviction that if his orchids ever bloom, his wife will come back to life – transports Margaret to the Ahns’ seven-day cruise across the Pacific in the summer of ’69 when she was a lovesick teen nicknamed Monkey, when her beloved if not servile Uncle Bong betrayed the family, and when her beautiful mother’s encounter with a Brazilian playboy ultimately chartered her death a decade later.

Like the seas, the journey had its highs and lows. It was magic, tragic, exotic and erotic – all things new to Margaret, including her romance with the dashing Adam Kang, a young Korean Brit who loved her but hated himself as the two sailed through a whole courtship as if ship years were measured in hours. Indeed, clocked love and lost paradise lay the seeds of Ahn Love.