"A hauntingly poetic family drama and coming-of-age story that reveals a dark corner of South Korean history through the eyes of a small community living in a reformatory center-a stunning work of great emotional power from the critically acclaimed author of If You Leave Me"-- Provided by publisher. In 2011, Eunju Oh opens her door to greet a stranger: a young Korean American woman holding a familiar-looking knife--a knife Eunju hasn't seen in more than thirty years, and that connects her to a place she'd desperately hoped to leave behind forever. In South Korea in the 1980s, young Eunju and her mother are homeless on the street. After being captured by the police, they're sent to live within the walls of a state-sanctioned reformatory center that claims to rehabilitate the nation's citizens but hides a darker, more violent reality. While Eunju and her mother form a tight-knit community with the other women in the kitchen, two teenage brothers, Sangchul and Youngchul, are compelled to labor in the workshops and make increasingly desperate decisions--and all are forced down a path of survival, the repercussions of which will echo for decades to come.
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