A seductive, disorienting novel that manipulates the fragile line
between dreams and reality, unfolding over a day and a night in the
sweltering heat of Seoul's summer, by South Korea's leading contemporary
writer
It's 28-year-old Ayami's final day at her box-office job in Seoul's only
audio theater for the blind. The theater is shutting down and Ayami's
future is uncertain.
Her last shift completed, Ayami walks the streets of the city with her
former boss late into the night, searching for a mutual friend who is
missing. Their conversations take in art, love, food, and the
inaccessible country to the north. The next day, Ayami acts as a guide
for a detective novelist visiting from abroad. 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. Ayami enters a world of
increasingly tangled threads, and the past intrudes upon the present as
overlapping realities repeat, collide, change, and reassert
themselves.
Blisteringly original, Untold Night and Day 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 masterfully realized in English by
Man Booker International Prize-winning translator Deborah Smith, Bae
Suah's hypnotic novel asks whether more than one version of ourselves
can exist at once, demonstrating the malleable nature of reality as we
know it.
