Read Around Asia Challenge
Read at least one book by an author from each country in Asia.
Best books from Asia (1405)
1171.
Country: Asia / 
South Korea
South Korea
Description:
Winner of the Munhakdongne Novel Award, South Korea's most prestigious literary prize. Cabinet 13 looks exactly like any normal filing cabinet…Except this cabinet is filled with files on the ‘symptomers’, humans whose strange abilities and bizarre experiences might just mark the emergence of a new species. But to Mr Kong, the harried office worker whose job it is to look after the cabinet, the symptomers are a headache; especially the one who won’t stop calling every day, asking to be turned into a cat. A richly funny and fantastical novel about the strangeness at the heart of even the most ev... continue
1172.
The Prisoner : A Memoir by Hwang Sok-yong EN
Country: Asia / South Korea
South Korea
Description:
A sweeping account of imprisonment--in time, in language, and in a divided country--from Korea's most acclaimed novelist In 1993, writer and democracy activist Hwang Sok-yong was sentenced to five years in the Seoul Detention Center upon his return to South Korea from North Korea, the country he had fled with his family as a child at the start of the Korean War. Already a dissident writer well-known for his part in the democracy movement of the 1980s, Hwang's imprisonment forced him to consider the many prisons to which he was subject--of thought, of writing, of Cold War nations, of the heart.... continue
1173.
Shoko's Smile : Stories by Choi Eunyoung EN
Country: Asia / South Korea
South Korea
Description:
A bestselling and award-winning debut collection from one of South Korea's most prominent young writers. In crisp, unembellished prose, Eun-young Choi paints intimate portraits of the lives of young women in South Korea, balancing the personal with the political. In the title story, a fraught friendship between an exchange student and her host sister follows them from adolescence to adulthood. In "A Song from Afar," a young woman grapples with the death of her lover, traveling to Russia to search for information about the deceased. In "Secret," the parents of a teacher killed in the Sewol ferr... continue
1174.
Please Look After Mom : A Novel by Kyŏng-suk Sin EN
Country: Asia / South Korea
South Korea
Description:
Follows the efforts of a family to find the mother who went missing from Seoul Station and their sobering realizations when they recall memories that suggest she may not have been happy.
1175.
Perros / Dog Days by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim ES
Country: Asia / South Korea
South Korea
Description:
Un cómic íntimo y revelador sobre la esencia de la familia y la necesidad de crear vínculos, por la multigalardonada autora de Hierba y La espera, con más de 50.000 ejemplares vendidos en España. ***IMPRESCINDIBLE PARA LOS AMANTES DE LOS PERROS*** «Un arte poderoso, de trazo salvaje y negros muy densos». New York Times Book Review En el centro de esta historia hay una mujer que nunca consideró traer un perro a casa. Pero su marido, triste por la muerte de su abuela, con la que le unían fuertes lazos desde la infancia, insiste y acaban teniendo uno. Es el primer paso para un cambio en la vida d... continue
1176.
Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim EN
Country: Asia / South Korea
South Korea
Description:
This true story of a Korean comfort woman documents how the atrocity of war devastates women’s lives Grass is a powerful antiwar graphic novel, telling the life story of a Korean girl named Okseon Lee who was forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War—a disputed chapter in twentieth-century Asian history. Beginning in Lee’s childhood, Grass shows the lead-up to the war from a child’s vulnerable perspective, detailing how one person experienced the Japanese occupation and the widespread suffering it entailed for ordinary Koreans. Keum Suk Gendry-Kim em... continue
1177.
One Left: A Novel by Kim Soom EN
Country: Asia / South Korea
South Korea
Description:
During the Pacific War, more than 200,000 Korean girls were forced into sexual servitude for Japanese soldiers. They lived in horrific conditions in “comfort stations” across Japanese-occupied territories. Barely 10 percent survived to return to Korea, where they lived as social outcasts. Since then, self-declared comfort women have come forward only to have their testimonies and calls for compensation largely denied by the Japanese government. Kim Soom tells the story of a woman who was kidnapped at the age of thirteen while gathering snails for her starving family. The horrors of her life as... continue
1178.
Pizza Girl : A Novel by Jean Kyoung Frazier EN
Country: Asia / South Korea
South Korea
Description:
In the tradition of audacious and wryly funny novels like The Idiot and Convenience Store Woman comes the wildly original coming-of-age story of a pregnant pizza delivery girl who becomes obsessed with one of her customers. Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial about it all. She's grieving the death of her father (whom she has more in common with than she'd like to admit), avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future. Her world... continue
1179.
The Hole : A Novel by Hye-young Pyun EN
Country: Asia / South Korea
South Korea
Description:
Winner of the 2017 Shirley Jackson Award Named One of the Top 10 Thrillers to Read This Summer by Time Magazine. In this tense, gripping novel by a rising star of Korean literature, Oghi has woken from a coma after causing a devastating car accident that took his wife's life and left him paralyzed and badly disfigured. His caretaker is his mother-in-law, a widow grieving the loss of her only child. Oghi is neglected and left alone in his bed. His world shrinks to the room he lies in and his memories of his troubled relationship with his wife, a sensitive, intelligent woman who found all of her... continue
1180.
Bluebeard's First Wife by Seong-nan Ha EN
Country: Asia / South Korea
South Korea
Description:
Ha looks closely at the sordid underbelly of suburbia in Bluebeard's First Wife, the latest from one of Korea's preeminent authors.