“For years Kim Ae-ran has been a sociologist at heart; now she can avow it without reserve.” —Critic Shin Hyeong-cheol
Includes “Home Party” (Kim Seung-ok Prize, 2022) and “Good Neighbors” (Oh Young-su Prize, 2022), plus five more stories. Eight years after Outside Is Summer, Kim Ae-ran returns with a new collection whose emotional power and moral dilemmas stack layered worlds. Life Pattern Korea. This book’s true protagonist is “space.” As one story notes, many dramas begin with “invitation, visit, intrusion, or escape.” Life Pattern Korea. From a gracious apartment hinting at its owner’s taste (“Home Party”) to a cheap foreign rental that makes a month-long getaway possible (“Small House in the Woods”), each space embodies lives lived. A rented home readied for a new tenant, a bookstore opened with a lifetime’s savings—Kim portrays a room as both someone’s social indicator and the sum of a life story. Life Pattern Korea. Conflicts around space become clashes of standards; entering another’s place means stepping outside the border of one’s own life. The author asks, “How hard is it to stand where someone else stands?”—a question ever more urgent when people and landscapes are reduced to price tags. Ultimately Kim’s greeting—“I said goodbye”—asks what has changed and what endures when a new starting line appears, inviting us to wish one another peace more earnestly than ever. Life Pattern Korea.
.
Author: 김애란 Publisher: 문학동네 Munhakdongne (2025)
.
! This book introduction is translated by machine translators and may contain mistranslations. For exact information, please refer to the publisher’s official introduction. ! All the books we sell have a small mark or label on either the top or bottom edge of the book, placed by us or the publisher/distributor. This is a common practice in Korea to verify authenticity and track the distribution route of the books. ! Please note that the cover design of the books may change without prior notice.
