The Woman Wearing a Straw Crown begins with Matsuno Hana living an ordinary but emotionally constricted life in Japan. Everything changes when the police call her at work and tell her that her mother, Matsuno Sachiko, has been critically injured in a fire at the small lunchbox shop she has run for years. Hana rushes […]
A Mouth Full of Fins is a horror novella about music, obsession, artistic failure, plagiarism, family inheritance and a mermaid whose song consumes everyone who hears it. The central character is Sunhyung Yoo, a former aspiring songwriter who has given up music after the collapse of her band and is trying to rebuild her life […]
Self-Defense Club is a Korean feel-good trauma-healing novel about Choi Jeongdo, a former national-team taekwondo hopeful who now runs a failing dojang in Mapo. After a viral video turns him into “the man in the dobok who protects without asking,” he starts an adult self-defense class. The class becomes a small found-family of wounded people […]
The House of Growth is a strange, tender, angry science-fiction ghost story about children, public care, disability, adoption, technology, institutional violence, and the question of who has the right to call a child “mine.” It is set in a future Korea where child-rearing is treated as a responsibility of the whole society. There are state-supported […]
The Execution is a short, furious political horror novella about a second martial law in South Korea, the crushing of civil society, and a supernatural revenge carried out by the dead. It begins as realism, almost reportage, and then turns into a ghost story of collective vengeance. Its first sentence says that this is a […]
This is a linked-story novel built around Joo Gwan-sik, a high-school mathematics teacher whose life has been shaped by failure, guilt, logic, and cats. The book is not a single linear crime novel but a sequence of connected cases. Each story begins with an animal, usually a cat, but expands into human loneliness, trauma, crime, […]
Cloud People is a bleak, furious, darkly funny dystopian social novel about poverty, class hatred, family obligation, spectacle, shame, and escape. It is narrated by Oh Haneul, a young woman born on a vast pink cloud that floats 1.5 kilometres above a city. The cloud is not a soft white natural cloud but a toxic, […]
The Future of Adults is a short story collection by Pyeon Hye-young that examines adulthood not as a stable or authoritative state, but as a condition marked by fear, moral compromise, silence, and deferred responsibility. Across its stories, adults are repeatedly shown as unreliable, ethically ambiguous, or quietly desperate figures, while children and marginalized individuals […]
Black Deer follows In-yeong, a withdrawn young woman whose life becomes entangled with that of Ui-seon, a fragile and taciturn coworker. The novel opens in a dreamlike state, establishing an atmosphere of unease, darkness, and bodily anxiety. In-yeong senses from the beginning that something is deeply wrong, though it cannot yet be named. Her attention […]
Lemon is a poignant exploration of loss and its aftermath, centering around the unsolved murder of Hae-Un, a high school girl. The novel delves into the lives of those connected to Hae-Un, emphasizing the impact on her family and friends rather than focusing on identifying the murderer. The narrative unfolds through eight chapters, each presenting […]