Showing results by narrator "Janet Song" in All Categories

Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more 'plantlike' existence, decides to become a vegetarian, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares. In South Korea, where vegetarianism is almost unheard of and societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye's decision is a shocking act of subversion.

Eleven-year-old Japanese American Owen has been in Japan for his sixth-grade year. By March he finally feels like he's getting the hang of the new culture, making friends at school, and feeling at home with the "weird" food. But early one morning, everything changes - and Owen suddenly finds himself just trying to survive one of history's most devastating disasters.

In 19th-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu (“women’s writing”). With the arrival of a silk fan on which Snow Flower has composed for Lily a poem of introduction in nu shu, their friendship is sealed. As the years pass, through famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their arranged marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood.

Shanghai, 1937. Pearl and May are two sisters from a bourgeois family. Though their personalities are very different - Pearl is a Dragon sign, strong and stubborn, while May is a true Sheep, adorable and placid - they are inseparable best friends. Both are beautiful, modern, and living carefree lives until the day their father tells them that he has gambled away the family's wealth and that in order to repay his debts, he must sell the girls as wives to two 'Gold Mountain' men: Americans.

This stunning fantasy inspired by Chinese folklore is a companion novel to Starry River of the Sky and the New York Times bestselling and National Book Award finalist When the Sea Turned to Silver In the valley of Fruitless mountain, a young girl named Minli lives in a ramshackle hut with her...

Nineteen-year-old Joy Louie has run away from her home in 1950s America to start a new life in China. Idealistic and unafraid, she believes that Chairman Mao is on the side of the people, despite what her family keeps telling her. Meanwhile, Pearl returns to China to bring Joy home - if she can. For Mao has launched his Great Leap Forward, and each passing season brings ever greater hardship. Pearl must use her contacts from her decadent childhood in 1930s Shanghai to find a way to safety - and a chance of joy.

WINNER OF THE MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE 'An authentic, moving story that brings to vivid life the deep family connections that lie at the core of Korean culture' Gary Shteyngart 'Kyung-Sook Shin's tale... has hit a nerve' Guardian 'A raw tribute to the mysteries of motherhood' New York Times 'The...

When Communist Party leaders adopted the one-child policy in 1980, they hoped curbing birthrates would help lift China's poorest and increase the country's global stature. But at what cost? Now, as China closes the book on the policy after more than three decades, it faces a population grown too old and too male, with a vastly diminished supply of young workers. Mei Fong has spent years documenting the policy's repercussions on every sector of Chinese society.

As tensions rise on the Korean peninsula, US diplomat Nate Simon is sent to Seoul to gauge the political situation and advise the president. He also needs to find out why someone sent the president an ancient, intricately carved comb with an ivory inlay of a two-headed dragon. Though familiar with Korea’s language and culture, Nate knows little of its troubled history. Beautiful and mysterious embassy aide Anna Carlson believes it’s time he learns, starting with the extraordinary story of Korea’s last queen.

At the urging of a Los Angeles detective, international rights lawyer Anna Carlson assists in a murder investigation. It’s a personal request from Suk-bo Yi, a ninety-nine-year-old woman questioned in a mysterious death at a Koreatown nursing home. A stranger to Anna, Suk-bo has a tale to tell. For reasons of her own, she’s chosen Anna - only Anna - to hear it...

A haunting account of teaching English to the sons of North Korea's ruling class during the last six months of Kim Jong-il's reign Every day, three times a day, the students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jong-il and North Korea: Without you, there is no motherland. Without...

Adopted when she was only days old, Ivy Hon knows little about her lineage. But when she’s stricken with a mystery illness, the results of a genetic test to identify the cause attract the FBI. According to Ivy’s DNA, she’s related to the Full Moon Killer, who has terrorized the Pacific Northwest for decades. Ivy is the FBI’s hope to stop the enigmatic predator from killing again.

FROM HAN KANG, WINNER OF THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE “[Han Kang’s] intense poetic prose . . . exposes the fragility of human life.”—The Nobel Committee for Literature, in the citation for the Nobel Prize A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE ONE OF...

In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flower beds and false reports fly. Conspiracies abound in a community that normalizes paranoia and suspicion. Some try to flee - whether to a mysterious gambling bordello or to ancestral homes that can be reached only underground through muddy caves, sewers, and tunnels. Others seek out the refuge of Nest County, where traditional Chinese herbal medicines can reshape or psychologically transport the self. Each life is circumscribed by secrets and transcendent delusions.

WINNER OF THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE STORY PRIZE The breathtaking debut of an important new voice—centered on a constellation of Korean American families “To encounter these achingly truthful, beautiful stories of newcomer Americans is like gazing up at the...

"Each chapter of this enrapturing novel is elegantly brief and charged with barely contained emotion." --New York Times Book Review A gripping debut set in modern-day Tokyo and inspired by a true crime, for readers of Everything I Never Told You and The Perfect Nanny, What's Left of Me Is Yours...

Forty years ago in China, marriage was universal, compulsory, and a woman's only means to a livelihood. Enter the one-child policy, which despite its horrors, resulted in China's first generations of urban only-daughters - girls who were raised without brothers and pushed to study, achieve, and succeed as if they were sons. Fast forward to the present, where in an urbanized economic powerhouse, enough of these women have decided to postpone marriage - or not marry at all - to spawn a label: "leftovers". Unprecedentedly well-educated and goal-oriented, they struggle to find partners.

A best-selling and award-winning debut collection from one of South Korea's most prominent young writers. In crisp, unembellished prose, Choi Eunyoung paints intimate portraits of the lives of young women in South Korea, balancing the personal with the political. In the title story, a fraught friendship between an exchange student and her host sister follows them from adolescence to adulthood. In 'A Song from Afar', a young woman grapples with the death of her lover, travelling to Russia to search for information about the deceased. 

For the first time, Euna Lee—the young wife, mother, and film editor detained in North Korea—tells a harrowing, but ultimately inspiring, story of survival and faith in one of the most isolated parts of the world. On March 17, 2009, Lee and her Current TV colleague Laura Ling were working on...

Sixty-eight-year-old Hattie Kong, descendant of Confucius, daughter of an American missionary, has lived to see both her husband and her best friend die back-to-back in a single year. But two years later, it’s time for Hattie to start over. She moves to a small New England town where she is soon joined by a Cambodian American family and an ex-lover—now a retired neuroscientist—all of them looking for their own new lives.