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A Love Story from the End of the World

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A Love Story from the End of the World

By: Juhea Kim
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About this listen

From the acclaimed author of Beasts of a Little Land and Reese's Book Club pick City of Night Birds, an exquisite, globetrotting story collection about humans in precarious balance with the natural world.

Spanning multiple locations and times, and rendered in fine detail and vivid color, this transportive, expansive collection shows what it means to live as human inhabitants on our one miraculous planet. Lyrical, at times hilarious, and always heartfelt, each of these ten stories is a reflection of individual choice in the face of man-made apocalypse: in a near-future Seoul, where air pollution has become so fatal that the city has been encased in a translucent biodome, a civil engineer charged with its upkeep contemplates an arranged marriage. A painter, disenchanted with New York City, travels to the South of France and falls into a dalliance with an entrepreneur who claims to have invented a new color. And on an island where the Indian and Pacific Oceans meet, upon which other countries have relegated their waste to form a mountain of landfill, a local boy facing daily privation gets internet famous for his K-pop-inspired dances.

With the clear-eyed reverence of Richard Powers and the sparkling sincerity of George Saunders, Juhea Kim's first story collection views our broken world–and broken hearts–from breathtaking heights. A Love Story from the End of the World delivers an impassioned reminder that, without nature, we are nothing at all.

©2025 Juhea Kim (P)2025 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic Reviews

"A rare jewel of a novel that shimmers with beauty, wisdom, and artistry. Propelled by a devourable plot that kept me turning the pages long after I should have been asleep, City of Night Birds is an epic story of ambition, desire, and dance, that feels both like a novel that will be read and loved for the next one hundred years, and essential reading for right now. I could not have loved it more."

—Coco Mellors, New York Times bestselling author of Cleopatra and Frankenstein and Blue Sisters

"Written in lush and evocative prose, Juhea Kim's A Love Story from the End of the World is like a precision cut diamond that fractures light into a spectrum of possible futures on this, our wounded planet. Kim's characters yearn for connection, bargain with the spectres of their own mortality, and burn bright with the insistence that they will thrive, even among the wreckage wrought by our species. Each of these ten stories showcases Kim's finely tuned attention to detail and gift for infusing even the smallest moments with the richness of complex hearts and minds. In the end, despite flights of imagination, Kim's stories ultimately tether us to the earth and demand that we give it our attention. This is an exquisite and essential collection."

—Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, author of What We Fed to the Manticore

"In A Love Story from the End of the World, Juhea Kim offers both an unsettling glimpse at what climate change might mean for our planet, and a vision of the transcendent moments of beauty and human connection that make it possible to survive in a changing world."

—Ash Davidson, author of Damnation Spring

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