Your Neighbour's Table
Regular price
€19.99
'An important literary piece of feminist activism'
'Taps into the everyday minutiae of motherhood, baring to all the unspoken labours that women take on both inside and out of parenthood'
'Really made me reflect on what it actually means to be a part of a community'
'Given recent news stories this feels like an incredibly relevant read'
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From the award-winning Korean author Gu Byeong-mo and International Booker-nominated translator Chi-Young Kim, comes a thought-provoking story of community and the cultural expectations of motherhood.
When Yojin moves with her husband and daughter into the Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments, she's ready for a fresh start. Located on the outskirts of Seoul, the experimental community is a government initiative designed to boost the national birth rate. Like her neighbours, Yojin has agreed to have at least two more children over the next ten years.
Yet, from the day she arrives, Yojin feels uneasy about the community spirit thrust upon her. Her concerns grow as communal child care begins and the other parents show their true colours. Your Neighbour's Table traces the lives of four women in the apartments, all with different aspirations and beliefs.
Will they find a way to live peacefully? Or are society's expectations stacked against them from the start?
A trenchant social novel from an award-winning author, Your Neighbour's Table incisively illuminates the unspoken imbalance of women's parenting labour and the challenges of working towards a better life.
[Published in North America with the title APARTMENT WOMEN]
Gu Byeong-mo was born in 1976 in Seoul. She studied Korean language and literature at Kyung Hee University, and worked as an editor. She made her literary debut with the novel Wizard Bakery (2009), which won the Changbi Prize for Young Adult Fiction. It became bestseller in Korea and was translated into many different languages. Her short story collection Hoping That It Wasn't Only Me (2015) received Writer of the Year Award and Hwang Sun-won Literary Award for New Writers.