My Year Abroad by Chang-Rae Lee

This is two interwoven stories that will leave you thinking--and maybe a little worried about the twenty somethings that you know. Twenty-year-old Tiller was supposed to be in college on an overseas program, but unbeknownst to his dad, he has spent the last few months on a series of bizarre adventures in Asia. He was at loose ends, not sure what to do or where he was going scholastically, and when he gets noticed by Pong, and pulled into his shady wrong doings, he is helpless to stop himself. It all goes terribly wrong and we find out the exact details of that as the story unfolds, but it is clear fromt he beginning that he is in some sort of hiding. So what does he do? When the story opens he shacks up with a new girlfriend, Val, and her son, who are in a witness protection program and share Tiller’s penchant for hiding in plain sight. Entrenched in her own secrets, Val does not pry into Tiller’s troubles as he attempts to process recent tumultuous events that have left him so rudderless. They are an unlikely pair but over the course of the novel we start to see what they see in each other, and the intricately told story has a satisfying ending.