A seductive, disorienting novel that manipulates the fragile line
between dreams and reality, by South Korea's leading contemporary
writer
A startling and boundary-pushing novel*, Untold Night and Day* tells the
story of a young woman's journey through Seoul over the course of a
night and a day. It's 28-year-old Ayami's final day at her box-office
job in Seoul's audio theater. Her night is spent walking the sweltering
streets of the city with her former boss in search of Yeoni, their
missing elderly friend, and her day is spent looking after a mysterious,
visiting poet. Their conversations take in art, love, food, and the
inaccessible country to the north.
Almost immediately, in the heat of Seoul at the height of the summer,
order gives way to chaos as the edges of reality start to fray, with
Ayami becoming an unwitting escort into a fever-dream of increasingly
tangled threads, all the while images of the characters' overlapping
realities repeat, collide, change, and reassert themselves in this
masterful work that upends the very structure of fiction and narrative
storytelling and burns itself upon the soul of the reader.
By one of the boldest and most innovative voices in contemporary Korean
literature, and brilliantly realized in English by International Man
Booker-winning translator Deborah Smith, Bae Suah's hypnotic and wholly
original novel asks whether more than one version of ourselves can exist
at once, demonstrating the malleable nature of reality as we know it.
