If you need a comparison, To the Warm Horizon is Korea’s answer to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Here is another Korean novel published by Honford Star and another piece of exciting genre fiction. I’m very glad Bae Myung-hoon has this ability, and I’m thankful someone with his intellect has written novels in Korean.” To the Warm Horizon by Choi Jin-young Park Chan-wook has this to say: “ Writing science fiction requires the capability to write elaboratively about big concepts as much as it requires logic and imagination. While the book is structured as a series of short stories, they are all interconnected and all explore the effects of living in such a place as the Beanstalk.īeyond the book’s stunning cover design and the fact that it’s a Korean sci-fi novel in English, another reason to be hyped is that the book, rather incredibly, features a heartfelt recommendation from Korea’s most revered filmmaker, Park Chan-wook ( Oldboy and The Handmaiden). The events of Towertake place in a skyscraper (known as Beanstalk) that also exists as its own sovereign nation. It will also be the first Korean sci-fi novel that we (and many other) readers of Korean literature in translation will have ever read. It is one of three new Korean books in translation coming from the fantastic Honford Star in 2021. Toweris a speculative science fiction novel from Korean author Bae Myung-hoon.

An incredible start to 2021 for Korean literature. Translated with the utmost love and care by Chi-young Kim, My Brilliant Life is a book which puts its characters at the heart of everything, bringing them to life and treating them with so much tenderness. With Areum unlikely to live for much longer, he plans to gift the finished manuscript to his parents before his seventeenth, and final, birthday. Areum is a boy overflowing with love, and he has been listening carefully to the disjointed stories of life and love taught to him by his parents.Īreum has taken the stories told to him by his parents, and is compiling them into a manuscript about young love and parenthood. My Brilliant Lifetells the story of a sixteen-year-old named Areum, a boy born with a rapid ageing disease.

And what a start to the year this is! Ae-ran Kim’s debut novel has already been made into a Korean movie and, now, we get a stunning English translation from Chi-young Kim.

Published early in 2021 by Forge Books, My Brilliant Lifewill be most readers’ first Korean book of the year.

Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung