Winner, Daesan Literary Prize 2015
“That’s how it generally is with Aeja’s stories. They’re as potent as a putrid peach. Listening to her words your head starts to droop with their sticky juice trickling down your ears, until all you can do is succumb to the saccharine flow.”
From one of South Korea’s most acclaimed young authors comes the story of two sisters, Sora and Nana. When Sora was ten years old, and Nana was nine, their father died in a freak accident at the factory where he worked, his body sucked under a huge cogwheel, crushed beyond recognition. Their mother Aeja, numb with grief, gives in to torpor, developing an unhealthy obsession with the paradoxical violence implicit in life.
Now adults, Sora finds herself dreaming of the past when she discovers that Nana is pregnant. Her initial reaction is shock – though they live together, she never even realised her younger sister had a lover – and Nana’s icy response to her attempt at being considerate (‘You hate this, so don’t pretend like I’m some poor pregnant woman you have to pity’) drives a wedge between the two. Can Naghi – the boy who shared their childhood, and the simple, nourishing meals cooked by his mother – help the sisters break free of Aeja’s worldview in which life is ultimately futile and love is always doomed?
A delicate stylist with an unflinching social gaze, in I’ll Go On Hwang Jungeun has crafted a poignant novel with an uncanny ear for the unspoken secrets and heartaches buried beneath daily life and family ritual. Above all, it is a stunning exploration of the intensity of early bonds – and the traces they leave on us as we grow up.
PRAISE
‘A profound, lyrical incantation… What could be a fairly depressing story is raised to a thing of crystalline incandescence because of the sensitivity and humanity with which both author and translator craft this work’ — Translating Women
‘Powerful and challenging’ — Foreword Reviews
‘I’ll Go On tenderly and poetically examines the bonds of sisterhood and family – the one we’re born with and the one we choose – exploring both the damage love can do and its capacity for healing. It’s at once sad and hopeful, quiet and yet full to the brim of an intense and beautiful energy.’ — Sophie Mackintosh
‘Sora, Nana and Naghi are such brutally tender characters. Though their voices are unique, their story is universal. There is truth on every page of this heart-shattering book.’ — Preti Taneja
‘Enthralling and poetic, with sentences that thrum full of melancholy and an understated intelligence that isn’t afraid to ask the vital questions of who and why we are.’ — Sharlene Teo
‘A witty, gentle, yet startling novel, in a sensitive and elegant translation – a gem’ — Helen Mort
