The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness, Kyungsook Shin
The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness, Kyungsook Shin
List: $22.95 | Sale: $16.07
Club: $11.47

The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness

Author: Kyung-sook Shin, Ha-yun Jung

Narrator: Emily Woo Zeller

Unabridged: 13 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/15/2015


Synopsis

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 MomHomesick 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.

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 Audie and Earphones Award–winning narrator, voice-over artist, actor, dancer, and choreographer. AudioFile magazine named her one of the Best Voices of 2013. Her voice-over career includes work in animated film and television in Southeast Asia.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Angela M on September 30, 2015

The feeling of a burden carried is pervasive in this novel, as the narrator moves us from the present when she is 32 and a novelist, to her past as a 16 year old girl working in an electronics factory in Seoul and back and forth in time again . The transitions to and from the different times are not......more

Goodreads review by Marie on December 31, 2023

"The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness" by Shin Kyung-Sook is a remarkable book that combines an immersive narrative voice, captivating insights into the protagonist's thoughts, and historical events from South Korea. This novel skillfully balances between fiction and reality, and the author's unique storyt......more

Goodreads review by Anna on April 24, 2020

An autobiographical novel told with great honesty and filled with intimate moments from her life as a factory girl and student living in a cramped room. It also gives a picture of South Korea’s rapid transition to a developed economy. At the heart of the novel is a tragedy that weighs on the author,......more

Goodreads review by Wiebke (1book1review) on July 24, 2022

This was a complete blind read, didn't know what I was getting into and really enjoyed it. Liked the writing and the alternation between the past events and the process of writing that story. As I am neither familiar with the politics surrounding the time she talks about I was captured by that as we......more


Quotes

“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)

“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

“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

  • NPR’s Great Reads