International Booker–nominated virtuoso Hwang Sok-yong is back with another powerful story—an epic tale that threads together a century of Korean history.
In contemporary Seoul, a laid-off worker stages a months-long sit-in atop a sixteen-story factory chimney. During the long and lonely nights, he talks to his ancestors, chewing on the meaning of life, on wisdom passed down the generations.
Through the lives of those ancestors, three generations of railroad workers, Mater 2-10 vividly portrays the struggles of ordinary Koreans, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the twenty-first century. It is at once a gripping account of a nation’s longing to be free from oppression, a lyrical folktale that reflects the blood, sweat, and tears shed by modern industrial laborers, and a culmination of Hwang’s career—a masterpiece thirty years in the making.
A true voice of a generation, Hwang shows again why he is unmatched when it comes to depicting the roots and reality of a divided nation and bringing to life the trials and tribulations of the Korean people.
“This nearly 500-page novel opens with a laid-off railroad worker in Seoul camped out on a platform atop a factory chimney, where he will stay for 410 consecutive days in protest. As he braves the elements, his ancestors, also railroad workers, visit to relive the murders, imprisonment and torture they endured under Japanese and US occupation while fighting for better working conditions. The Nobel Prize in literature almost always goes to a European, but for the next one that’s awarded to a non-European, I’m rooting for Hwang Sok-yong, perhaps South Korea’s most renowned author.”
Leland Cheuk, book critic and author of the No Good Very Bad Asian
“Bittersweet and darkly comic … richly rewarding read … This is a novel that shines a light on what it means to be an industrial worker in Korea and to wrestle with the issues of worker exploitation, international tension, and a still-divided nation.”
Driftless Area Review
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“[A]n absorbing look at an intriguing period of Korean history.”
Tony's Reading List
Praise for Familiar Things:
“A powerful examination of capitalism from one of South Korea’s most acclaimed authors … [Hwang] challenges us to look back and reevaluate the cost of modernization, and see what and whom we have left behind.”
The Guardian
Praise for Familiar Things:
“Hwang Sok-yong is one of South Korea’s foremost writers, a powerful voice for society’s marginalized, and Sora Kim-Russell’s translations never falter.”
Deborah Smith, translator of The Vegetarian
Praise for At Dusk:
“Having been imprisoned for political reasons, Hwang has a restrained, delicate touch, alive to the nuances of memory, the slipperiness of the past, and the difficult choices life forces us to make ... Subtly political, deeply humane, a story about home, loss, and the cost of a country’s advancement.”
Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Praise for Familiar Things:
“As one of the country’s most prominent novelists, Hwang has never shied away from controversy … With Familiar Things, Hwang turns his attention to the underside of South Korea’s remarkable economic development, namely, the vast underclass it has created.”
Boston Review
Praise for Familiar Things:
“Sora Kim-Russell’s translation moves gracefully between gritty, whiffy realism and folk-tale spookiness.”
The Economist
Praise for At Dusk:
“It’s a regretful, bittersweet exploration of modernization, which picks away at the country’s past and present, slowly becoming a moving reflection of what we gain and lose as individuals and a society in the name of progress … [Hwang’s] writing is laced with the hard-won wisdom of a man with plenty left to say.”
Ben East, The Observer
