A French diplomat arrives in late Joseon Korea and sees something he can’t quite recover from: Yi Jin performing the Dance of the Spring Oriole.

With the Emperor’s permission, he takes her with him to Paris—out of the court, out of the system that shaped her, into another that doesn’t quite know what to do with her either.

In Belle Époque Paris, Yi Jin gains a kind of freedom. Translating Korean literature, moving through salons, building a life that looks, from the outside, like autonomy. But the terms of that freedom are unstable, she remains caught between languages, between roles, between what has been taken from her and what she may not return to.

The novel tracks that tension alongside the slow unravelling of the Joseon court, ending in the assassination of the last empress—a historical rupture that echoes through Yi Jin’s life at a distance. Shin writes this almost like ballet, light stepped but dramatic, making for a story about love that is also about displacement, and about the cost of being moved from one world into another.

Picador paperback. Very good condition. A little creasing to covers and light edge wear. Internally clean and firm.