With spare, evocative prose, Snow Hunters traces the extraordinary journey of Yohan, who defects from his country at the end of the Korean War, leaving his friends and family behind to seek a new life in a port town on the coast of Brazil.
Though he is a stranger in a strange land, throughout the years in this town, four people slip in and out of Yohan's life: Kiyoshi, the Japanese tailor for whom he works, and who has his own secrets and a past he does not speak of; Peixe, the groundskeeper at the town church; and two vagrant children named Santi and Bia, a boy and a girl, who spend their days in the alleyways and the streets of the town. Yohan longs to connect with these people, but to do so he must sift through his traumatic past so he might let go and move on.
In Snow Hunters, Yoon proves that love can dissolve loneliness; that hope can wipe away despair; and that a man who has lost a country can find a new home. This is a heartrending story of second chances, told with unerring elegance and absolute tenderness.
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“Snow Hunters reads like a dream. Inthis quiet, evocative rendering, we espy lives muted by war, altered by lossand displacement, and ultimately mended by the salvaged threads of memories andlove. Paul Yoon’s writing intimates the emergence of a master stylist, eachsentence a jewel to be admired.”
— Vaddey Ratner, New York Times bestselling author of In the Shadow of the Banyan
“Behind every subtle gesture, this novel shimmers with a deep and complex history. Snow Hunters is a beautiful and moving meditation on a solitary life.”
— Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto“Paul Yoon’s sentences are startlingly beautiful. Lucid and clean and resonant, they build, in Snow Hunters, to form a novel that is deceptively light and extraordinarily tender.”
— Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author of The Monsters of Templeton“Paul Yoon offers a profound look at the consequences of war and what it means to begin a new life in the wake of its devastations…Brief in length, Snow Hunters is truly expansive in its scope and written in language as clear and bracing as snowmelt.”
— Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, National Book Award finalist“The brief, simple sentences that form this elegant tone poem of a novel, called Snow Hunters, have the effect of making you slow down to read them.”
— Entertainment Weekly“Reveal[s] the same shimmering, evocative spareness of his 2009 collection, Once the Shore. The result is that rare, precious gem, with every remaining word to be cherished for the many discarded to achieve perfection.”
— Library Journal (starred review)“The collection Once the Shore showcased Yoon’s piercing powers of story and language; this novel continues his stunning trajectory with prose so pristine it feels supernatural.”
— Publishers Weekly“Yoon’s delicate prose creates a haunting perspective.”
— Booklist“Expectations were high for [Yoon’s] debut novel—and with Snows Hunters, he has fulfilled them…An introspective and moving novel to savor.”
— BookPage“Since the novel’s pace is so still and observant, ordinary moments take on a graceful quality that might have gone unnoticed in less skilled hands.”
— Kirkus ReviewsBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Paul Yoon is the author of novels and two story collections, Once the Shore, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and The Mountain, which was a NPR Best Book of the Year. His novel Snow Hunters won the Young Lions Fiction Award. He is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars and the National Endowment for the Arts.