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The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness Audiobook
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Publisher Description
The highly anticipated release of the most personal novel by Kyung-sook Shin, who first burst onto the literary scene with the New York Times bestseller Please Look after Mom
Homesick and alone, a teenage girl has just arrived in Seoul to work in a factory. Her family, still in the countryside, is too impoverished to keep sending her to school, so she works long, sunless days on a stereo assembly line, struggling through night school every evening in order to achieve her dream of becoming a writer.
Korea’s brightest literary star sets this complex and nuanced coming-of-age story against the backdrop of Korea’s industrial sweatshops of the 1970s and takes on the extreme exploitation, oppression, and urbanization that helped catapult Korea’s economy out of the ashes of war. But it was girls like Shin’s heroine who formed the bottom of Seoul’s rapidly changing social hierarchy, forgotten and ignored.
Richly autobiographical, The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness lays bare the conflict and confusion Shin faces as she confronts her past and the sweeping social change of the past half-century. Cited in Korea as one of the most important literary novels of the decade, this novel cements Shin’s legacy as one of the most insightful and exciting writers of her generation.
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“Not only vividly evokes the political unrest and fraught city life in 1970s Seoul but also deftly explores the struggles of a writer attempting to come to terms with her past through her work.”
— Booklist
Quotes
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“A moving portrayal of the surprising nature, sudden sacrifices, and secret reveries of motherhood.”
— Elle -
“The most moving and accomplished, and often startling, novel in translation I’ve read in many seasons. Every sentence is saturated in detail.”
— Wall Street Journal -
“Intimate and hauntingly spare. A raw tribute.”
— New York Times Book Review -
“The novel’s language, so formal in its simplicity, bestows a grace and solemnity.”
— Boston Globe -
“Shin’s work often inhabits the space between story and reality…It’s no wonder that…The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness has the tenor of a ghost story.”
— NPR -
“Isolation and suicide among young adults worldwide have only tragically multiplied, making The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness urgently auspicious…This book is essential reading.”
— Library Journal (starred review) -
“There’s a hypnotic quality to this melancholy coming-of-age story…It melds Shin’s characteristic themes of politics, literature, and painful experience into a mysteriously compelling whole.”
— Kirkus Reviews -
“Narrator Emily Woo Zeller establishes a mournful tone for an unusual coming-of-age story…Zeller embodies the somber mood of this period in Korean history through her precise pace and low pitch.”
— AudioFile
Awards
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A NPR’s Great Reads Selection of 2015
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About Kyung-sook Shin
Kyung-sook Shin is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous works of fiction and is one of South Korea’s most widely read and acclaimed novelists. She was the first woman to be awarded the Man Asian Literary Prize. She has also been honored with the Manhae Literature Prize, the Dong-in Literature Prize, and the Yi Sang Literary Prize, as well as France’s Prix de l’Inaperçu.
About Emily Woo Zeller
Emily Woo Zeller is an artist, actor, dancer, choreographer, and voice artist who has won Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration in 2018. She began her voice-over career by voicing animation in Asia. AudioFile magazine named her one of the Best Voices of 2013 for her work in Gulp. Other awards include the 2009 Tristen Award for Best Actress as Sally Bowles in Cabaret and the 2006 Roselyn E. Schneider Prize for Creative Achievement.