2023.10.9 New Arrivals
8 Lives of a Century-Old TricksterAuthor: Mirinae Lee
Publisher: Little Brown
At the Golden Sunset retirement home, it is not unusual for residents to invent stories. So when elderly Ms. Mook first begins to unspool her memories, the obituarist listening to her is skeptical. Stories of captivity, friendship, murder, adventure, assumed identities and spying. Stories that take place in WWII Indonesia; in Busan during the Korean War; in cold-war Pyongyang; and in China. The stories are so colorful and various, at times so unbelievable, that they cannot surely all belong to the same woman. Can they?
As playful and thought-provoking as it is compelling, as brutal and harrowing as it is achingly poignant and tender, this is a novel about love and war, deceit and betrayal, identity, storytelling and the trickery required for survival.
Who Ate Up All the Shinga? : An Autobiographical Novel - Weatherhead Books on Asia
Author: Wan-so Pak
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Park Wan-suh is a best-selling and award-winning writer whose work has been widely translated and published throughout the world. "Who Ate Up All the Shinga?" is an extraordinary account of her experiences growing up during the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean War, a time of great oppression, deprivation, and social and political instability.
Park Wan-suh was born in 1931 in a small village near Kaesong, a protected hamlet of no more than twenty families. Park was raised believing that "no matter how many hills and brooks you crossed, the whole world was Korea, and everyone in it was Korean." But then the tendrils of the Japanese occupation, which had already worked their way through much of Korean society before her birth, began to encroach on Park's idyll, complicating her day-to-day life.
With acerbic wit and brilliant insight, Park describes the characters and events that came to shape her young life, portraying the pervasive ways in which collaboration, assimilation, and resistance intertwined within the Korean social fabric before the outbreak of war. Most absorbing is Park's portrait of her mother, a sharp and resourceful widow who both resisted and conformed to stricture, becoming an enigmatic role model for her struggling daughter. Balancing period detail with universal themes, Park weaves a captivating tale that charms, moves, and is wholly engrossed.
Lemon
Author: Kwon Yeo-Sun
Publisher: Head of Zeus
In the summer of 2002, Kim Hae-on was killed in what became known as the High School Beauty Murder. There were two suspects: Shin Jeongjun, who had a rock-solid alibi, and Han Manu, to whom no evidence could be pinned. The case went cold.
Seventeen years pass without justice, and the grief and uncertainty take a cruel toll on her younger sister, Da-on, in particular. Unable to move on with her life, Da-on tries in her own twisted way to recover some of what she's lost, ultimately setting out to find the truth of what happened.
Shifting between the perspectives of Da-on and two of Hae-on's classmates, Lemon ostensibly takes the shape of a crime novel. But identifying the perpetrator is not the main objective here: Kwon Yeo-sun uses this well-worn form to craft a searing, timely exploration of privilege, jealousy, trauma, and how we live with the wrongs we have endured and inflicted in turn.
While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America
Author: Yeonmi Park
Publisher: Threshold Editions
The North Korean defector, human rights advocate, and bestselling author of "In Order to Live" sound the alarm on the culture wars, identity politics and authoritarian tendencies tearing America apart. After defecting from North Korea, Yeonmi Park found liberty and freedom in America. But she also found a chilling crackdown on self-expression and thought that reminded her of the brutal regime she risked her life to escape. When she spoke out about the mass political indoctrination she saw around her in the United States, Park faced censorship and even death threats. In "While Time Remains," Park sounds the alarm for Americans by highlighting the dangerous hypocrisies, mob tactics and authoritarian tendencies that speak in the name of wokeness and social justice. No one is spared in her eye-opening account, including the elites who claim to care for the poor and working classes but turn their backs on anyone who dares to think independently.
DB Books
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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