The year was 1950, and the great powers of the Cold War era had begun a conflict on the Korean Peninsula that would claim as many as 5 million lives and create millions more refugees. In the U.S. today, that conflict is widely known as “the forgotten war,” but its devastation still reverberates on the tense, divided peninsula and in Korean communities around the world.
Bora Lee Reed
This battle-ravaged landscape is the setting for Bora Lee Reed’s memorable new novel, Song for Another Home (Simon & Schuster, July 2026). Song is in every sense a war story, but the explosions and gunfire are always in the distance. Instead, Reed’s focus is on a family that has gotten separated in the chaos and their harrowing struggle to survive and reunite.
Reed is the chief communications officer at the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy. She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Warren Wilson College and a master’s degree in theology from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and was a 2023 Reese’s Book Club LitUp fellow. She’s worked at UC Berkeley for over 20 years and developed the novel throughout that time, writing in early mornings, evenings, weekends and during vacations.
In an interview, Reed explained that the story was inspired by her own family’s wartime experience — her lost grandfather, and her grandmother’s desperate flight from Pyongyang with four children.
