Violets
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'Dreamy, immersive and evocative' TLS
'Darkly beautiful' Frances Cha
'Strange and gripping' Guardian
San is twenty-two and alone when she happens upon a job at a flower shop in Seoul's bustling city centre.
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.
But over the course of one summer, San meets a curious cast of characters: the nonspeaking shop owner, a brash co-worker, aggressive customers and an enigmatic magazine photographer. Fuelled by a quiet desperation to jump-start her life, she dares, briefly, to dream of connection in an unforgiving world.
Translated by Anton Hur
Kyung-Sook Shin is one of South Korea's most widely read and acclaimed novelists. She has been honored with the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Dong-in Literature Prize, and the Yi Sang Literary Prize, Mark of Respect Award (2012), and Ho-Am Prize for an Art (2013) as well as France's Prix de l'Inaperçu and Man Asian Literary Prize (2011). She is the author of many prior works of fiction in addition to PLEASE LOOK AFTER MOTHER, which has been published in 41 countries, and was on the New York Times bestselling list. Shin was a visiting scholar at Columbia University from 2010 to 2011. She currently lives in Seoul.