Violets: From the bestselling author of Please Look After Mother

A young girl named San is ostracized from her community for a moment of intimacy with a girl named Namae. Twenty-two years later, San works at a flower shop in Seoul and becomes obsessed with a magazine photographer. Violets explores the high stakes of a woman's search for autonomy and attachment in an unforgiving society.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 14 March 2024
Publisher: Orion Publishing Co

South Korea, 1970. San is a lonely child, ostracized from her community. She soon finds a friend in a girl called Namae, until one afternoon changes everything. Following a moment of intimacy in a minari field, Namae violently rejects San, setting her on a troubling path.

We next meet San, aged twenty-two, when she happens upon a job at a flower shop in Seoul's bustling city center. Over the course of one hazy, volatile summer, San is introduced to a curious cast of characters: the mute shop owner, a brash co-worker, kind farmers, and aggressive customers. Fuelled by a quiet desperation to jump-start her life, she plunges headfirst into an obsession with a passing magazine photographer. Throughout it all, San's moment with Namae continues to linger in the back of her mind.

A story of thwarted desire, misogyny, and erasure, Violets reveals the high stakes involved in one woman's desperate search for both autonomy and attachment in an unforgiving society.

Weight: 202g
Dimension: 129 x 197 x 19 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474623568