Originally broadcast at 7 pm ET Thursday, April 8, 2021.

A powerful and taut novel about racial tensions in LA, Your House Will Pay follows two families—one Korean-American, one African-American—grappling with the effects of a decades-old crime. In the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager, Los Angeles is as tense as it’s been since the unrest of the early 1990s. Protests and vigils are being staged all over the city. It’s in this dangerous tinderbox that two families must finally confront their pasts.

Attica Locke calls the novel a “touching portrait of two families bound together by a split-second decision that tore a hole through an entire city.”

Your House Will Pay was the 2019 Winner of the California Book Award, Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Buzzfeed, Book Riot, and Lithub Best of The Year.

Steph Cha is author of the Juniper Song crime trilogy. She’s a critic whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she served as noir editor, and is the current series editor of the Best American Mystery & Suspense anthology. A native of the San Fernando Valley, she lives in Los Angeles with her family.

About Chautauqua Institution: Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state that comes alive each summer with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. As a community, we celebrate, encourage and study the arts and treat them as integral to all of learning, and we convene the critical conversations of the day to advance understanding through civil dialogue. CHQ Assembly is the online expression of Chautauqua Institution's mission.