Welcome to the Hyunamdong Bookshop

Hwang Bo-reum

Translated

by Shanna Tan

A heart-warming novel set in a South Korean bookshop, about finding acceptance and comfort with the healing power of books.

Yeong-ju did everything she was supposed to, go to university, marry a decent man, get a respectable job. Then it all fell apart. Burned out, Yeong-ju abandons her old life, quits her high-flying career, divorces her husband, and follows her dream. She opens a bookshop.

In a quaint neighbourhood in Seoul, surrounded by books, Yeong-ju and her customers take refuge. From the lonely barista to the unhappily married housewife, and the writer who sees something special in Yeong-ju - they all have disappointments in their past. The Hyunam-Dong Bookshop becomes the place where they all learn how to truly live.

Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop is a heart-warming story about finding comfort and acceptance in your life - and the healing power of books.

Hwang Bo-reum studied in Computer Science and worked as a software engineer. Hwang authored several essay collections: I Read Every Day, I Tried Kickboxing for the First Time and This Distance is Perfect. Welcome to Hyunam-dong Bookshop is her first novel.

Held Anne Michaels

The triumphant new novel from the author of the Orange Prize-winning Fugitive Pieces: a soaring and luminous story of chance and change

1917. On a battlefield near the River Aisne, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory – a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast – as the snow falls.

1920. John has returned from war – alive, but not still whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts whose messages he cannot understand.

26 October 2023

HARDBACK / 9781526662279 / £14.99

EXPORT TPB / 9781526662262 / £13.99

EBOOK / 9781526662309 / £10.49

TERRITORY: World English

TRANSLATION RIGHTS:

ANZ Pub Date 31 October 2023

TRADE PAPERBACK / AUS $29.99 / NZ $32.99

So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.

AnneMichaels' work has been published in over forty-five countries and has won awards ncluding the Orange Prize, the GuardianFiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and was Toronto's Poet Laureate 2015-2019. Her novel FugitivePieceswas adapted as a feature film. She lives in Canada.

09 November 2023

HARDBACK / 9781526659118 / £16.99

EXPORT TPB / 9781526662538 / £13.99

EBOOK / 9781526659095 / £11.89

TERRITORY: Commonwealth (excluding Canada)/UK/Open Market

TRANSLATION RIGHTS: ANZ Pub Date 28 November 2023

TRADE PAPERBACK / AUS $29.99 / NZ $32.99

NEW TITLES • JULY-DECEMBER 2023