Violets Av Kyung-Sook Shin

Translated by Anton Hur''Violets lavishes attention on the kind of person who often slips through the cracks, unseen or ignored. There is a beauty and a bravery in speaking for small lives'' Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Harmless Like YouSouth Korea, 1970. San is a lonely child, ostracised from her community. She soon finds a friend in a girl called Namae, until one afternoon changes everything. Following a moment of intimacy in a minari field, Namae violently rejects San, setting her on a troubling path.We next meet San, aged twenty-two, when she happens upon a job at a flower shop in Seoul''s bustling city centre. Over the course of one hazy, volatile summer, San is introduced to a curious cast of characters - the mute shop owner, a brash co-worker, kind farmers and aggressive customers - and, fuelled by a quiet desperation to jump-start her life, she plunges headfirst into obsession with a passing magazine photographer. Throughout it all, San''s moment with Namae continues to linger in the back of her mind.A story of thwarted desire, misogyny and erasure, Violets reveals the high stakes involved in one woman''s desperate search for both autonomy and attachment in an unforgiving society.