Adult Book Group 04/09

Join us for our Adult Book Group - Thursday 4 September, 7-8:00 pm

Tickets £7.00/£15.50 (includes a glass of soju)

This month, we’ll be discussing Violets by acclaimed South-Korean author Kyung-Sook Shin. This seminal novel was first published in Korean in 2001 and translated into English twenty years later. It charts the life of an isolated young woman in 1970’s Seoul and remains fresh, relevant and profoundly moving.

When a childhood friend rejects young San, it intensifies her loneliness and fear of abandonment. Already an outsider in her rural village, she eventually moves to Seoul and begins working in a flower shop. Shin writes lyrically of San’s attempts to orient herself to a vast, often hostile, city and to tentatively forge new friendships. “Violets is a novel built on the proximity of beauty and violence” and evokes a society in which repression and alienation are apparent everywhere.

You can order your copy of Violets from The Little Bookshop when you book your place and receive a 15% discount (£9.99 RRP).

Booking is essential, online or at the bookshop.

Kyung-Sook Shin was awarded the Man Asian Prize in 2012 for Please Look After Mother.

Critical acclaim for Violets:

‘There’s a timeless, fable-like quality to the narration that makes the story strange and gripping…Shin has an intense feeling for place, and an ability to bring it alive not as mere setting but as intensely felt imaginative terrain.’ – Lara Feigel, The Guardian

‘Violets offers its readers a delicately crafted narrative of a woman, plain and inconspicuous, who probes the questions of placelessness and identity left by a childhood trauma…Shin’s novel leads us to think about the other women around us who, like San, ache in silence but resist anonymity.’ – Sophie Hwang, The Oxonian Review