The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness: A Novel - Hardcover

Intimate and hauntingly spare. A raw tribute.

A moving portrayal of the surprising nature, sudden sacrifices, and secret reveries of motherhood.

Shin writes about a time and setting that may seem remote to many Americans, but in many ways her specificity is universal; we all have a monster that has no face, and which we try to avoid. Shin paints her own monster for us.

Shin's unemotional delivery and understated yet devastating perspective on her country's expectations and norms are familiar from her earlier novels, but this book's grim glimpse into the lives of factory girls is notably haunting. There's a hypnotic quality to this melancholy coming-of-age story described as 'not quite fact and not quite fiction.' Allusive and structurally sophisticated, it melds Shin's characteristic themes of politics, literature, and painful experience into a mysteriously compelling whole.

Affecting. How does an author write about a troubled land when her sorrow is so great? Shin's novel provides a powerful record of the time.

The most moving and accomplished, and often startling, novel in translation I've read in many seasons. Every sentence is saturated in detail.

Haunting. The novel's language, so formal in its simplicity, bestows a grace and solemnity.

The tone is as dreary as its topic, but it is a fictional account of what absolutely must be told and known. Intense but revealing historical fiction that the author calls something between 'not quite fact, not quite fiction.'

Homesick and alone, a teen-aged girl has just arrived in Seoul to work in a factory. Her family, still in the countryside, is too impoverished to keep sending her to school, so she works long, sun-less days on a stereo-assembly line, struggling through night school every evening in order to achieve her dream of becoming a writer.Korea’s brightest literary star sets this complex and nuanced coming-of-age story against the backdrop of Korea’s industrial sweatshops of the 1970’s and takes on the extreme exploitation, oppression, and urbanization that helped catapult Korea’s economy out of the ashes of war. But it was girls like Shin’s heroine who formed the bottom of Seoul’s rapidly changing social hierarchy, forgotten and ignored. Richly autobiographical, The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness lays bare the conflict and confusion Shin faces as she confronts her past and the sweeping social change of the past half-century. Cited in Korea as one of the most important literary novels of the decade, this novel cements Shin’s legacy as one of the most insightful and exciting writers of her generation.