By Man Asian Literary Prize winner Kyung-Sook Shin, "a moving delve into a lonely psyche" that follows a neglected young woman's search for human connection in contemporary Seoul (YZ Chin).
San is twenty-two and alone when she happens upon a job at a flower shop in Seoul’s bustling city center. Haunted by childhood rejection, she stumbles through life—painfully vulnerable, stifled, and unsure. She barely registers to others, especially by the ruthless standards of 1990s South Korea.
Over the course of one hazy, volatile summer, San meets a curious cast of characters: the nonspeaking shop owner, a brash coworker, quiet farmers, and aggressive customers. Fueled by a quiet desperation to jump-start her life, she plunges headfirst into obsession with a passing magazine photographer.
In Violets, best-selling author Kyung-Sook Shin explores misogyny, erasure, and repressed desire, as San desperately searches for both autonomy and attachment in the unforgiving reality of contemporary Korean society.
“With this trigger-warning-worthy tale, Man Asian Literary Prize–winning Shin delivers another meticulous, haunting characterization of an isolated young woman in crisis.” —Booklist, starred review
“With sensuous prose intuitively translated by Hur, Shin vividly captures San’s tragic failure to connect with others. This is hard to put down.” —Publisher’s Weekly
“A shimmering text that blends stark violence with delicate, considered language, preserving, with tender attention, a woman rejected and erased by society.” —Asymptote
“A novel built on the proximity of beauty and violence. . . . Shin has an intense feeling for place, and an ability to bring it alive not as mere setting but as intensely felt imaginative terrain.” —The Guardian
“Shin is known for revealing the ways in which her culture oppresses and isolates people—especially women.” —Kirkus
"The beauty of Kyung-Sook Shin’s prose is in its expert weave of immersion, precision and surprise. The narrative ground of San, our unlikely but necessary heroine, may be fraught with unseen tensions yet the writing is as smooth as a finished surface. Despite being consistently tyrannized and quieted by her surroundings, San carries within her an indefatigable fire, a persistence to be. San represents so many women whose stories are never told."—Weike Wang, author of Joan Is Okay
“Darkly beautiful,Violets explores the toll of abandonment and the relentless marginalization of a helpless young woman. The protagonist, San, shivers with insecurity and loneliness but still dares, briefly, to dream of friendship and a normal life. Shin writes of the cruelty and dangers of disempowerment, and an ensuing spiral of despair.”—Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face
