The premise is genuinely inventive and Djuna builds a world that feels layered and alive. Neuro-implants called Worms, fake identities stacked inside fake identities, a corporation behaving exactly the way you would expect one to behave if no one was watching. The pacing is relentless. This book moves.

A government-run apartment complex outside Seoul promises support, community, and a “village.” But in Apartment Women, that village starts to feel like pressure. My review of Gu Byeong-mo’s sharp social novel about motherhood, housing, and control.

A bleak, heartbreaking collection of Korean historical fiction about poverty, survival, and the brutal divide between those with money and those without. These stories don’t soften anything, especially the final one, “The Underground Village,” which is hard to forget.

I went into Hunger expecting horror. I didn’t expect to finish it in tears. This is an intense, intimate love story told through grief, desperation, and a choice that refuses to let death be final.

At Dusk follows one man’s life while moving quietly through modern Korean history. As Park Minwoo reflects on his past, the novel traces postwar development, political change, and economic growth without ever turning them into spectacle.

This is a layered, carefully constructed book that trusts the reader. History remains in the background, shaping the characters without overt explanation. It’s a novel that asks for patience and rewards close attention.

If I Had Your Face follows four young women living in Seoul, each navigating life under the weight of Korea’s beauty standards, economic pressure, and limited choices. Their paths are different, but they intersect through shared spaces and shared constraints.

This is not a light read. The book looks closely at how beauty functions as a kind of currency and how survival sometimes requires choices that feel impossible from the outside. It’s raw in places and often bleak, but it remains true to its characters. For me, it was worth sitting with.

A strange and unsettling collection of Korean speculative stories that resist explanation. With the Heart of a Ghost sits with grief, loneliness, and transformation, letting meaning hover just out of reach rather than spelling it out.

A practical, emotionally grounded memoir about two women who choose to build a life together as chosen family. Two Women Living Together looks honestly at compromise, independence, and what it means to create a good life on your own terms.

When you know the horror on the page isn’t just fiction, when you’ve seen it reflected in real women’s lives, the rage hits differently. Molka is a brutal, all-too-real story of voyeurism, shame, and female rage that refuses to stay quiet.

Fragmented, strange, and emotionally sharp — b, Book, and Me is a surreal story of teenage isolation, quiet rage, and the fragile survival found in friendship.

Quiet, strange, and emotionally raw, Convalescence is a sparse but unsettling meditation on isolation and the quiet disappearance of self.