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In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Donāt miss outāpurchases support your local bookstore!
Shop nowThe Girl Who Wrote Loneliness
Narrator
Emily Woo Zeller
This audiobook uses AI narration.
Weāre taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
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Translator
Ha-yun Jung
Length
13 hours
Language
English
The highly anticipated release of the most personal novel by Kyung-sook Shin, who first burst onto the literary scene with the New York Times bestseller Please Look after Mom
Homesick and alone, a teenage girl has just arrived in Seoul to work in a factory. Her family, still in the countryside, is too impoverished to keep sending her to school, so she works long, sunless days on a stereo assembly line, struggling through night school every evening in order to achieve her dream of becoming a writer.
Koreaās brightest literary star sets this complex and nuanced coming-of-age story against the backdrop of Koreaās industrial sweatshops of the 1970s and takes on the extreme exploitation, oppression, and urbanization that helped catapult Koreaās economy out of the ashes of war. But it was girls like Shinās heroine who formed the bottom of Seoulās rapidly changing social hierarchy, forgotten and ignored.
Richly autobiographical, The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness lays bare the conflict and confusion Shin faces as she confronts her past and the sweeping social change of the past half-century. Cited in Korea as one of the most important literary novels of the decade, this novel cements Shinās legacy as one of the most insightful and exciting writers of her generation.
Kyung-sook Shin is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous works of fiction and is one of South Koreaās most widely read and acclaimed novelists. She was the first woman to be awarded the Man Asian Literary Prize. She has also been honored with the Manhae Literature Prize, the Dong-in Literature Prize, and the Yi Sang Literary Prize, as well as Franceās Prix de lāInaperƧu.
Emily Woo Zeller is an Audie and Earphones Awardāwinning narrator, voice-over artist, actor, dancer, and choreographer. AudioFile magazine named her one of the Best Voices of 2013. Her voice-over career includes work in animated film and television in Southeast Asia.
Reviews
āA moving portrayal of the surprising nature, sudden sacrifices, and secret reveries of motherhood.ā
āThe most moving and accomplished, and often startling, novel in translation Iāve read in many seasons. Every sentence is saturated in detail.ā
āIntimate and hauntingly spare. A raw tribute.ā
āThe novelās language, so formal in its simplicity, bestows a grace and solemnity.ā
āShinās work often inhabits the space between story and realityā¦Itās no wonder thatā¦The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness has the tenor of a ghost story.ā
āIsolation and suicide among young adults worldwide have only tragically multiplied, making The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness urgently auspiciousā¦This book is essential reading.ā
āNot only vividly evokes the political unrest and fraught city life in 1970s Seoul but also deftly explores the struggles of a writer attempting to come to terms with her past through her work.ā
āThereās a hypnotic quality to this melancholy coming-of-age storyā¦It melds Shinās characteristic themes of politics, literature, and painful experience into a mysteriously compelling whole.ā
āNarrator Emily Woo Zeller establishes a mournful tone for an unusual coming-of-age storyā¦Zeller embodies the somber mood of this period in Korean history through her precise pace and low pitch.ā
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