The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness

Shin, Kyung-Sook

ISBN 10: 162899889X ISBN 13: 9781628998894

Publisher: Center Point Pub, 2016

Synopsis

Homesick and alone, a teenaged girl has just arrived in Seoul to work in a factory. Her family, still in the countryside, is too impoverished to keep sending her to school, so she works long, sunless days on a stereo-assembly line, struggling through night school every evening in order to achieve her dream of becoming a writer.

About this title

Review:

Praise for Kyung-Sook Shin

Intimate and hauntingly spare. A raw tribute. "

Intimate and hauntingly spare. A raw tribute. "

Intimate and hauntingly spare. A raw tribute.

Haunting. The novel s language, so formal in its simplicity, bestows a grace and solemnity."

A moving portrayal of the surprising nature, sudden sacrifices, and secret reveries of motherhood.

Shin writes about a time and setting that may seem remote to many Americans, but in many ways her specificity is universal; we all have a monster that has no face, and which we try to avoid. Shin paints her own monster for us.

Shin's unemotional delivery and understated yet devastating perspective on her country's expectations and norms are familiar from her earlier novels, but this book's grim glimpse into the lives of factory girls is notably haunting. There's a hypnotic quality to this melancholy coming-of-age story described as 'not quite fact and not quite fiction.' Allusive and structurally sophisticated, it melds Shin's characteristic themes of politics, literature, and painful experience into a mysteriously compelling whole.

Affecting. How does an author write about a troubled land when her sorrow is so great? Shin's novel provides a powerful record of the time.

The most moving and accomplished, and often startling, novel in translation I've read in many seasons. Every sentence is saturated in detail.

Haunting. The novel's language, so formal in its simplicity, bestows a grace and solemnity.

About the Author:

Kyung-Sook Shin is one of South Korea's most widely read and acclaimed novelists. She is the author of The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness, I'll Be Right There, and Please Look After Mom, which was a New York Times bestseller and a Man Asian Literary Prize winner.

About this edition

• Publisher: Center Point Pub
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 162899889X
• ISBN 13: 9781628998894
• Binding: Library Binding
• Number of pages: 518