Shiny is still open, drawing people in with its bright, flashing lights and promises of good fortune. When they first arrived in Japan, they opened Shiny, a pachinko parlour. They fled the civil war there over fifty years ago, along with thousands of others, and haven't been back since. The plan is for Claire to visit Korea with her grandparents. Claire finds herself dividing her time between tutoring twelve-year-old Mieko in an apartment in an abandoned hotel and lying on the floor at her grandparents: daydreaming, playing Tetris, and listening to the sounds from the street above. Women's calves, men's shoes, heels trodden down by the weight of bodies borne for too long. I lie on the floor and gaze out of the window. From the author of Winter in Sokcho, which won the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Elisa Shua Dusapin's voice is distinctive and unmistakable. An exquisitely-crafted debut, which won the Prix Robert Walser, Winter in Sokchois a novel about shared identities and divided selves, vision and blindness, intimacy and alienation. As she's pulled into his vision and taken in by his drawings, she strikes upon a way to finally be seen. But he takes no interest in the Sokcho she knows - the gaudy neon lights, the scars of war, the fish market where her mother works. When she agrees to accompany him on trips to discover an "authentic" Korea, they visit snowy mountaintops and dramatic waterfalls, and cross into North Korea. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North's watchtowers.
It's winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. As if Marguerite Duras wrote Convenience Store Woman - a beautiful, unexpected novel from a debut French-Korean author.
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