A deceptively slim novel about one woman’s life inside a culture that keeps insisting its cruelties are ordinary.

Kim Jiyoung is not presented as exceptional. She is all the things a woman is expected to be. A daughter, student, worker, wife, mother. We follow her as she moves through the expected stages of life while absorbing humiliations, restrictions, preferences, dismissals and structural punishments that accumulate around gender. The book’s force comes from its plainness. It does not need to exaggerate; it simply records.

A major Korean bestseller and one of the defining contemporary feminist novels of the last decade, this is fiction written almost like a social document: direct, compressed, and built out of the patterns women are told to treat as private inconveniences rather than public evidences. It sits well with readers interested in feminist fiction, workplace and domestic inequality, Korean literature, or novels that use restraint as a form of indictment. For readers of Han Kang, Elena Ferrante’s social anger, Annie Ernaux’s cool documentary mode, and fiction where the domestic is never merely domestic.

Simon & Schuster / Scribner UK paperback, first published in Great Britain in 2020. Originally published in Korea in 2016; English translation by Jamie Chang, 2018. Good second-hand condition.