It is because of greed, an obsession with power – and the human selfishness that drives the two – that the Saha Estates even exist. It was at Saha – home to misfits, outcasts and those let down by ordinary society – that she found community, and raised an orphan, Woomi – who will have her own battles against the state as she grows older – as though she were her own. Her true story is recounted only later: she was a midwife on the mainland, until she fled to Saha, fearing the repercussion of an illegal abortion she administered that left the woman dead.

There is Eunjin, a second-class citizen desperate to return as a caregiver to the children’s home she grew up in.Īnd then there is Granny Konnim, the matriarch of the Saha Estates, who tends to the communal garden. There is the woman who folds paper into boats in a revolt against her brother’s disappearance. There is the man guilty of setting alight governmental flags, who believes that “Town took care of its people like wholesale supermarkets kept track of their stock”. But it is the wide array of endearing characters that makes it captivating. Its social critique – against plutocracy, systemic inequality, gendered violence – is palpable.

“Each time they paused to take stock of their lives, they found themselves unfailingly worse off than before Saha residents thus grew more childish, petty, and simpleminded,” Cho writes.īut this book, translated into English by Jamie Chang, has a warmer feel than the clinical tone of Cho’s previous hit. How can it not, in a place like Saha, where it is everyone’s traumatic pasts that have led them here? The state of play is bleak. The novel is framed as a mystery surrounding this event, but takes in so much more. One night Su is found dead and Do-kyung goes missing. Jin-kyung and her brother, Do-kyung, live together in a Saha unit, until Do-kyung starts a relationship with Su, a doctor. The word “Saha”, resident Jin-kyung understands, seemed to say: “This is as far as you get.” The Saha residents aren’t deemed useful enough to be “citizens”, or even members of the second tier, who live in the city on temporary visas and hope to climb the ladder. “Strange policies so commonly enforced called common sense into question,” the narrator observes. It’s a fiercely controlled place, where some songs and books – even some words – are banned. The Saha Estates lie on the outskirts of Town, a privatised city-nation supposedly governed by an anonymous group of co-ministers.

Cho nam joo books