Violets
ByPublisher Description
By Man Asian Literary Prize winner Kyung-Sook Shin, "a moving delve into a lonely psyche" that follows a neglected young woman's search for human connection in contemporary Seoul (YZ Chin).
San is twenty-two and alone when she happens upon a job at a flower shop in Seoul’s bustling city center. Haunted by childhood rejection, she stumbles through life—painfully vulnerable, stifled, and unsure. She barely registers to others, especially by the ruthless standards of 1990s South Korea.
Over the course of one hazy, volatile summer, San meets a curious cast of characters: the nonspeaking shop owner, a brash coworker, quiet farmers, and aggressive customers. Fueled by a quiet desperation to jump-start her life, she plunges headfirst into obsession with a passing magazine photographer.
In Violets, best-selling author Kyung-Sook Shin explores misogyny, erasure, and repressed desire, as San desperately searches for both autonomy and attachment in the unforgiving reality of contemporary Korean society.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesViolets Reviews
“Un livre très étonnant. Je n'ai jamais lu de roman avec une prose à la fois si minimaliste et si poétique. Le seul livre auquel je pourrais le comparer c'est l'Etranger de Camus écrit du point de vu d'une jeune femme coréenne. Malgré une ambiance globalement sombre, je n'avais pas vu venir la fin qui était particulièrement triste et violente. Je pense que ce livre, par sa singularité, va me marquer pendant encore longtemps.”About Kyung-Sook Shin
Kyung-Sook Shin is one of South Korea’s most widely read and acclaimed novelists. She has been awarded the Man Asian Literary Prize, the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Dong-in Literature Prize, the Yi Sang Literary Prize, and many others, including France’s Prix de l’Inaperçu. Shin is the author of multiple books, including The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness, I’ll Be Right There, The Court Dancer, and the New York Times-bestselling Please Look After Mom, which has been published in over forty countries.
Anton Hur has won the PEN Translates and PEN/Heim grants for literary translation. His other work includes the English translations of Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City (Grove) and Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny (Honford Star). He resides in Seoul.
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