Where medicine meets the Divine. Where identity, science, and spirituality collide. In GRABBING FOG, Sophia Kim Apple-a trailblazing Korean American physician whose life was shaped by the poliovirus-emerges as a powerful new voice for women in medicine. Her thought-provoking narrative weaves a deeply personal and medically rich story set against the backdrop of America's twin pandemics: a global virus and a reckoning with racial injustice. The novel opens on the turbulent day of June 4, 2022, with a harrowing incident: A Black woman is injured during a protest following a volatile confrontation with her Hasidic Jewish roommate. What follows is an emotional unraveling of blame, fear, and fractured identities. Corpses fill refrigerated trucks on the streets of New York City. A shooting incident erupts inside a hospital, where a diverse group of physicians-immigrants and children of immigrants-hide, argue and fracture under the weight of fear and cultural trauma. Each of them bears the burden of history: the scars of discrimination, echoes of ancestral displacement, the heavy silence of being grouped as "other" among society. Dr. Apple deftly unites scientific fact with historical insight. She unearths forgotten moments and figures in medical history; she interrogates how science is interpreted, distorted and polarized-especially when tangled with race, fear, and personal greed. GRABBING FOG is more than a chronicle of medicine or a cultural autopsy of a nation in crisis. It is a spiritual meditation. She reflects on how Americans suffer a deficit of imagining the lives of other people. In our pursuit of certainty, we replace empathy with blame, and curiosity with fear. We cling to comfortable narratives, even if false, and reject inconvenient truths, even those whispered by God through suffering, science, and silence. Her story is an urgent, lyrical call to resist chaos that drives us apart, and to reclaim the sacred, shared humanity that can draw us together.
