In Carol Roh Spaulding’s amazing linked story collection, “Waiting for Mr. Kim and Other Stories,” we find that rare gift — writing that gets just about everything done, and done very well. Every page not only delights and instructs but also provokes and moves us, lingering like a remembered dream. Recent winner of the prestigious Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, “Waiting” will quietly pull you in and knock you out.

Tracking four generations of the San Francisco-based Songs, a Korean American family, beginning in 1924 and extending to near the end of the century, “Waiting” centers on Gracie Song, whose mother came to the U.S. after waiting 13 years for her betrothed to earn enough money (as a field worker) to collect her in Korea. “Today I became an exile,” she declares, after the Immigration Act of that year “sealed the borders indefinitely to everyone on the globe. … If you left a wife behind, too bad.”

的格雷西之前,丁讲述from different family members’ minds and eras, inhabiting each so deeply that all become palpably alive and real, including detailed spates of good and bad luck: “It is true that my husband is both hardworking and goodhearted,” allows Mrs. Song, now a young mother in San Francisco, “… but I cannot will his tenderness; that is his own. In this respect, I have been fortunate.”

One of these narratives (Spaulding’s single departure from a crisp, up-close realism) is offered by a totally credible ghost: that of Gracie’s late older sister, Sung Maybelline, whose accidental death hastens Gracie’s own conception, “a child called into the world in the name of my loss.” Her parents are still too numbed by grief (for Sung Maybelline, their firstborn) to be paying attention when new baby Grace falls a short distance from an open window. And though the infant survives without damage, “even now, Grace remains in a state of slight but constant anticipation expecting to be propelled into her fate by some unseen hand.”

That quality of prose — piercing, empathic, gritty yet poetic — never wavers throughout this intricate tapestry of a family’s (especially Grace’s) particular evolution through time, space, economies, and sexual and cultural webs.

It’s fearless. Trust it.

“Waiting” carries us through Gracie’s San Francisco childhood, its deliciously itemized haunts (“Rudie’s Durable Buy-Trade-Sell”), early bouts with racism, and carryover tenets from the old country, such as “the thousand spirits of the household [Mrs. Song] was always ticking off like a grocery list — spirit of the lamp, the clock, the ashtray … the seat of your chair … the stove … closet … broom … shoes …”

In one astonishing passage starring the “hideous, indecorous lamp” little Gracie buys her parents to celebrate their citizenship, Spaulding (via her ghost narrator) zaps readers for a seamless, wry beat into the future, noting how that lamp will “outlast both of our parents. Father will die many years earlier than anyone expects, leaving Grace to pass through her adult life with a peripheral ache she often forgets to name. Mother … will live long enough to see her children’s children have children who will sport names like Kimisha and Tavian.”

What looms for the immigrant Songs is the riddle of their daughters’ marriages, a culturally fraught challenge. Grace’s older twin sisters, Sung Suk and Sung Ok, waste no time eloping with a Black welder and Chinese nightclub singer, respectively, to their parents’ horror. Grace is expected to accept an arranged marriage: Since both sisters have just eloped, she is her parents’ last hope. Helplessly, she watches while “her father made chitchat with Mr. Han and Mr. Kim, both ‘chong gaks, the bachelors who [had been waiting] … for her father to give [his daughters] away.’”

I beg to alert you that the above excerpts stand as only the earliest, tiny chips off a mountain of riches: a series of stunning, interwoven accounts as Grace encounters and survives innumerable powerful, thorny milestones: a turncoat husband, lecherous boss, wily children and grandchildren; even a (slightly improbable) late-life lover — a fascinating, wary pas de deux. (I soaked this section, and practically all this novel’s pages, with quantities of yellow highlighter.) None of these twists is strictly expected, yet none, given latter-day, socio-cultural awarenesses, completely surprise. In retrospect, all come to feel not only authentic but almost inevitable — an irreducible definition of art. What binds and illuminates these distinct yet connected accounts, like the rhythmic sweep of a lighthouse beam, is Grace herself: an acute, complex, articulate voice. It effortlessly incarnates her courage, fallibilities, and — certainly, real grace.

Joan Frank is a freelance writer.