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Start giftingViolets
Narrator
Cindy Kay
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Translator
Anton Hur
Length
7 hours 25 minutes
Language
English
By Man Asian Literary Prize winner Kyung-Sook Shin, "a moving delve into a lonely psyche" that follows a neglected young woman's search for human connection in contemporary Seoul (YZ Chin).
San is twenty-two and alone when she happens upon a job at a flower shop in Seoul's bustling city center. Haunted by childhood rejection, she stumbles through life—painfully vulnerable, stifled, and unsure. She barely registers to others, especially by the ruthless standards of 1990s South Korea.
Over the course of one hazy, volatile summer, San meets a curious cast of characters: the nonspeaking shop owner, a brash coworker, quiet farmers, and aggressive customers. Fueled by a quiet desperation to jump-start her life, she plunges headfirst into obsession with a passing magazine photographer.
In Violets, bestselling author Kyung-Sook Shin explores misogyny, erasure, and repressed desire, as San desperately searches for both autonomy and attachment in the unforgiving reality of contemporary Korean society.
Kyung-Sook Shin is one of South Korea's most widely read and acclaimed novelists. She has been awarded the Man Asian Literary Prize, the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Dong-in Literature Prize, the Yi Sang Literary Prize, and many others, including France's Prix de l'Inapercu. Shin is the author of multiple books, including The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness, I'll Be Right There, The Court Dancer, and the New York Times bestselling Please Look After Mom, which has been published in over forty countries.
Cindy Kay is a Chinese-Thai-American narrator and educator who grew up in the California Bay Area and lives in the Rockies. Her work has been described as listening to a "cozy best friend." She narrates fiction and nonfiction, and has studied Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, and Japanese.
Anton Hur has won the PEN Translates and PEN/Heim grants for literary translation. His other work includes the English translations of Sang Young Park's Love in the Big City and Bora Chung's Cursed Bunny. He resides in Seoul.
