Violets

Translated by Anton Hur

''Violets lavishes attention on the kind of person who often slips through the cracks, unseen or ignored. There is a beauty and a bravery in speaking for small lives'' Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Harmless Like You

South Korea, 1970.

San is a lonely child, ostracised 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 centre. 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 - and, fuelled by a quiet desperation to jump-start her life, she plunges headfirst into obsession with a passing magazine photographe