“A vivid, tactile, often claustrophobic, and gorgeously written novel.

Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine 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.” “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. 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. 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.Ībout the Translator: Aneesa Abbas Higgins has translated books by Elisa Shua Dusapin, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Ali Zamir, and Nina Bouraoui. Elisa Shua Dusapin’s voice is distinctive and unmistakable.Ībout the Author: Elisa Shua Dusapin was born in France in 1992 and raised in Paris, Seoul, and Switzerland. 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. As she’s pulled into his vision and taken in by his drawings, she strikes upon a way to finally be seen. 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. 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. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse.

Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North’s watchtowers. It’s winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. As if Marguerite Duras wrote Convenience Store Woman-a beautiful, unexpected novel from a debut French Korean author

Winter in sokcho