We are pleased to share that two Scribe books have made their way onto the NPR’s 2023 “Books We Love” list!
6 December, 2023
Two books on NPR’s Best of 2023
Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri was described by book critic Thúy Ðinh, as a “compact yet far-reaching novel endeavors to make visible both the female body and the structure of storytelling by using the idea of the birth canal as a site of conflicts and thwarted possibilities. ... In exploring women’s sexuality, mental health, reproductive choice and domestic violence, this gifted Indonesian author deftly explores topics that impact women in a Muslim-majority country.”
Mater 2–10 by Hwang Sok-yong (trans. Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae) was commended by book critic and author Leland Cheuk, who wrote that “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.”
If you’re looking for your own favourite book of 2023, why not try one of these?
Related Books
$17.00 USD
Birth Canal
This dazzling novella from a rising star of Indonesian literature explores generational legacies, lost loves, the damage that war does to men, and the damage that men do to women.
In today’s Jakarta, an unnamed man tells the story of his lifelong friend Nastiti, and what happened on the day she vanished. In the Dutch East Indies’ Semarang, a young Indo-Dutch girl, Rukmini, is captured by the Japanese military and is forced into prostitution. Years later, Arini travels to the Netherlands to share her mother’s dark past with a researcher.
After the American occupation of Japan in WWII ends, a former war photographer revisits his memories of Hanako, the wife of a traumatised ex-Imperial soldier, but can’t escape his own darkness. And in present-day Osaka, a young Indonesian woman, Dara, haunted by her past and struggling to conceive, becomes obsessed with a Japanese porn star.
Full of surprising turns, and in stunning prose, Birth Canal tells the interwoven stories of women that span time and history.
$22.00 USD
Mater 2-10
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE
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.
