Showing results by author "Kyung-Sook Shin" in Historical Fiction

Set in 1980s South Korea amid the tremors of political revolution, I'll Be Right There follows Jung Yoon, a highly literate, twenty-something woman, as she recounts her tragic personal history as well as those of her three intimate college friends. When Yoon receives a distressing phone call from her ex-boyfriend after eight years of separation, memories of a tumultuous youth begin to resurface, forcing her to re-live the most intense period of her life.

Korea's brightest literary star sets this complex and nuanced coming-of-age story against the backdrop of Korea's industrial sweatshops of the 1970s and takes on the extreme exploitation, oppression, and urbanization that helped catapult Korea's economy out of the ashes of war. But it was girls like Shin's heroine who formed the bottom of Seoul's rapidly changing social hierarchy, forgotten and ignored.

Two years after losing her daughter in a tragic accident, Hon finally returns to her home in the countryside to take care of her father. At first, her father appears withdrawn and fragile, an aging man, awkward but kind around his own daughter. Then, after stumbling upon a chest of letters, Hon discovers the truth of her father’s past and reconstructs her family history.