Winter in Sokcho Paperback – April 27, 2021 by Elisa Shua Dusapin (Author), Aneesa Abbas Higgins (Translator)
$14.95

Winter in Sokcho

Brand: Open Letter
Current Stock:
UPC: 9781948830416
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Authors: by Elisa Shua Dusapin (Author), Aneesa Abbas Higgins (Translator)
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  • Publisher : Open Letter (April 27, 2021)
  • Language : English
  • Paperback : 160 pages
  • ISBN-10 : 1948830418
  • ISBN-13 : 978-1948830416

It’s winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. The cold slows everything down. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North’s watchtowers. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape. The two form an uneasy relationship. When she agrees to accompany him on trips to discover an "authentic" Korea, they visit snowy mountaintops and dramatic waterfalls, and cross into North Korea. But he takes no interest in the Sokcho she knows―the gaudy neon lights, the scars of war, the fish market where her mother works. As she’s pulled into his vision and taken in by his drawings, she strikes upon a way to finally be seen. An exquisitely-crafted debut, which won the Prix Robert Walser, Winter in Sokcho is a novel about shared identities and divided selves, vision and blindness, intimacy and alienation. Elisa Shua Dusapin’s voice is distinctive and unmistakable.

Review

"Mysterious, beguiling, and glowing with tender intelligence, Winter in Sokcho is a master class in tension and atmospherics, a study of the delicate, murky filaments of emotion that compose a life. Dusapin has a rare and ferocious gift for pinning the quick, slippery, liveness of feeling to the page: her talent is a thrill to behold."—Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

"A vivid, tactile, often claustrophobic, and gorgeously written novel. An absolute joy from beginning to end."—Lara Williams, author of Supper Club

"Beautifully translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, comes together slowly, like a Polaroid photo, its effects both intimate and foreign."—TLS

"A masterful short novel"—New Statesman

"A punchy first novel."—Guardian Top 10 Best New Books in Translation

"Enigmatic, beguiling . . . This finely crafted debut explores topics of identity and heredity in compelling fashion. In its aimless, outsider protagonist there are echoes of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman."—Irish Times

"Dazzling."—Vogue Top Five Debuts

"I haven’t encountered a voice like this since Duras―spellbinding."—ELLE (France)

"Oiled with a brooding tension that never dissipates or resolves, Winter in Sokcho is a noirish cold sweat of a book."—Guardian

"A masterpiece."—Huffington Post

"Elisa Shua Dusapin’s first-person narrative is formed of crystalline sentences that favor lucid imagery to describe themes of loneliness, familial obligation, identity, societal pressures and sexuality."—ArtReview Asia

"The bustling seaside resort of Sokcho in South Korea is the perfect backdrop for this quietly haunting debut."—Daily Mail

"(A) haunting portrait of an out-of-season tourist town on the border between North and South Korea . . . The story that unfolds is chilling."—Monocle

"Narrated in an elegant, enigmatic voice that skillfully summons the tenderness and mutability of an inner life, Winter in Sokcho is a lyrical and atmospheric work of art."—Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti

"Atmospheric, exquisitely written and highly charged."—Olivia Sudjic, author of Sympathy

About the Author

Elisa Shua Dusapin was born in France in 1992 and raised in Paris, Seoul, and Switzerland. Winter in Sokcho is her first novel. Published in 2016 to wide acclaim, it was awarded the Prix Robert Walser and the Prix Régine Desforges and has been translated into six languages.

Aneesa Abbas Higgins has translated books by Elisa Shua Dusapin, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Ali Zamir, and Nina Bouraoui. Seven Stones by Vénus Khoury-Ghata was short-listed for the Scott-Moncrieff Translation Prize, and both A Girl Called Eel by Ali Zamir and What Became of the White Savage by François Garde won PEN Translates awards.

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