Untold Night and Day

Description

A seductive, disorienting, and wholly original story about parallel lives, unfolding over a day and a night in the sweltering heat of Seoul's summer. 'As cryptic and compelling as a fever dream... Bae Suah is one of the most unique and adroit literary voices working today' Sharlene Teo Finishing her last shift at Seoul's only audio theatre for the blind, Kim Ayami heads into the night with her former boss, searching for a missing friend. The following day, she looks after a visiting poet, a man who is not as he seems. Unfolding over a night and a day in the sweltering summer heat, their world's order gives way to chaos, the edges of reality start to fray, and the past intrudes on the present in increasingly disorientating ways. Untold Night and Day is a hallucinatory feat of storytelling from one of the most radical voices in contemporary Korean literature. 'Highly original... Once I finished it, much of it slipped into my subconscious' Daily Telegraph

Bae Suah (Author) Bae Suah was born in Seoul in 1965. She studied chemistry at university and wrote her first short story as a way of practising her typing. Since 1993 she has published more than a dozen novels and short story collections. Untold Night and Day is her first book to be published in the UK. Deborah Smith (Translator) Deborah Smith (@londonkoreanist) was born in Doncaster in 1987. She studied English and then Korean literature in the UK, and has translated several books by Bae Suah and Han Kang. She publishes Asian literatures in translation through Tilted Axis Press, which she founded in 2015.

Hypnotic... an uncannily affecting and dreamlike story of parallel lives and worlds. -- Chloe Ashby * Guardian * [A] highly original novel, full of unsolved mysteries, repeated motifs and startling prose... Remarkably fresh... Exhilarating... Once I finished it, much of it slipped into my unconscious. All that remains is a sense of Bae's boundless yet precise imagination. -- Luiza Sauma * Daily Telegraph * A metaphysical detective story, Untold Night and Day...draws on ideas from Korean shamanism...to venture in style and ambition far from the conventions of mystery narratives... Storylines echo one another and are braided into multilayered fictional universe with extraordinary skill... Bae's novel complicates the boundaries between self and other reality and make-believe, night and day. -- Sarah Shin * Observer * Bae Suah is one of Korea's most radical contemporary writers... Untold Night and Day is a hallucinatory novel propelled by the logic of dreams... Bae masterfully layers [her] themes into an almost hidden code beneath the novel's meditative surface. -- Jay G Ying * Guardian * Bae Suah's disturbing, beautifully controlled novel Untold Night and Day is a book of doubles, shadows and parallel worlds... a slim yet labyrinthine twist on a "choose your own adventure" story that disarms even as it disorients. -- Catherine Taylor * Financial Times *