Tailbone
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Apr 7, 2026
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
"An unforgettable debut novel, indelible, knowing, powerful, consuming. This marks the start of a major career." --Alexander Chee, author of How To Write an Autobiographical Novel
A fierce and gorgeous debut novel about a teenager who runs away from her abusive home to live in a boarding house for single women as a global financial crash threatens the people of Seoul.
Set in Seoul in 2008, Tailbone follows the story of an unnamed teenage girl who, after years of struggling with her alcoholic father's abuse, and what she sees as her mother's cowardice, decides to run away. At a boarding house for single women, the narrator is pulled into the orbit of one of the other girls living there: an older girl named Juju, whose beauty and hardscrabble determination greatly impress the narrator.
But when a global financial crisis reaches Korea, fears of a wider economic collapse bring the city to a standstill. Everything the girls have come to rely on for survival-mainly, the patronage of wealthy men-is put at risk. Everyone begins to struggle, especially Juju, who has long been dependent on one particular benefactor, a man who is all too aware of his power over her. As businesses close and winter sets in, the narrator is forced to reckon with not only her deepening fear for Juju's future, but also her own uncertain path. Will she stay on the run or go back home to her heartbroken mother? In a city where everything rots from greed and desperation, what can a helpless woman like Juju teach her about survival? Will their hope for each other ignite courage or destruction?
A poignant tale about survival, the impact of colonial and familial violence, class, privilege, and womanhood, Tailbone is a powerful and thrilling novel from a blazing new talent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Korean teenage runaway tries to reinvent herself during the 2008 recession in Yeun's remarkable debut. At 17, the unnamed narrator flees her family's cramped Seoul apartment, where her frustrated and underemployed father, a former financial manager, physically assaults her kindhearted mother. She rents a room at a women's boarding house across town and befriends Juju, a 30-year-old sex worker with a doll-like appearance, platinum blonde hair, and false eyelashes. Drawn to her housemates' consumer lifestyles, the narrator rapidly depletes her savings but shrinks from the idea of performing sex work, in large part because Juju incurs physical abuse from clients. Juju shows the narrator a way out: securing high-interest loans with counterfeit paperwork attached to her parents' credit history. The narrator's transformation is complete once she buys an assortment of cosmetics and dyes her hair blonde ("I felt like a new species. And now that I felt like one, I could start living like one"). Yeun offers a no-holds-barred view into her narrator's hardscrabble life, from her family home where "the boil of our underwear warmed our rooms," to the ways in which men's rage and shame over their financial failure manifest into violence against women. This is incandescent.
