As if Marguerite Duras wrote Convenience Store Woman - a beautiful, unexpected novel from a debut French-Korean author.
It's winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. The cold slows everything down. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North's watchtowers. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives- a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape. The two form an uneasy relationship. 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. 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. As she's pulled into his vision and taken in by his drawings, she strikes upon a way to finally be seen.
An exquisitely-crafted debut, which won the Prix Robert Walser, Winter in Sokcho is a novel about shared identities and divided selves, vision and blindness, intimacy and alienation. Elisa Shua Dusapin's voice is distinctive and unmistakable.
'Mysterious, beguiling, and glowing with tender intelligence, Winter in Sokcho is a master class in tension and atmospherics, a study of the delicate, murky filaments of emotion that compose a life. Dusapin has a rare and ferocious gift for pinning the quick, slippery, liveness of feeling to the page- her talent is a thrill to behold.'
-Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
'Enigmatic, beguiling ... This finely crafted debut explores topics of identity and heredity in compelling fashion. In its aimless, outsider protagonist there are echoes of Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman.''
-Sarah Gilmartin, Irish Times
'Dusapin's terse sentences are at times staggeringly beautiful, their immediacy sharply and precisely rendered from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins ... Oiled with a brooding tension that never dissipates or resolves, Winter in Sokcho is a noirish cold sweat of a book.'
-Catherine Taylor, Guardian
Author Biography:
Elisa Shua Dusapin (Author)
Elisa Shua Dusapin was born in France in 1992 and raised in Paris, Seoul, and Switzerland. Her first novel, Winter in Sokcho, was published in 2016 to wide acclaim and was awarded the Prix Robert Walser, the Prix Regine Desforges, and, after its translation into English, the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature.
Aneesa Abbas Higgins (Translator)
Aneesa Abbas Higgins has translated books by Elisa Shua Dusapin, Venus Khoury-Ghata, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Ali Zamir, and Nina Bouraoui. Seven Stones by Venus Khoury-Ghata was shortlisted for the Scott-Moncrieff Translation Prize, and both A Girl Called Eel by Ali Zamir and What Became of the White Savage by Fran ois Garde won PEN Translates awards.
