Exhibit
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- £5.49
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
From bestselling author R. O. Kwon, a powerful, blazing-hot novel about a woman caught between her desires and her life.
'Haunting and powerful' Madeline Miller
'Brisk, jolting, brilliant, beautiful, true' Andrew Sean Greer
'I tore through this' Raven Leilani, author of Luster
At a lavish party in the hills outside of San Francisco, Jin Han meets Lidija Jung and nothing will ever be the same for either woman. A brilliant young photographer, Jin is at a crossroads in her work, in her marriage to her college love Phillip, and in who she is and who she wants to be. Lidija is an alluring, injured world-class ballerina on hiatus from her ballet company under mysterious circumstances. Drawn to each other by their intense artistic drives, the two women talk all night.
Cracked open, Jin finds herself telling Lidija about an old familial curse, breaking a lifelong promise. She's been told that if she doesn't keep the curse a secret, she risks losing everything; death and ruin could lie ahead. As Jin and Lidija become more entangled, they realize they share more than the ferocity of their ambition, and begin to explore hidden desires. Something is ignited in Jin: her art, her body, and her sense of self irrevocably changed. But can she avoid the specter of the curse? Urgent, bold, and deeply moving, this novel asks: how brightly can you burn before you light your life on fire?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A female friendship takes on mythological and tragic dimensions in the haunting sophomore novel from Kwon (The Incendiaries). Jin Han, a Korean American photographer and Christian apostate, is at a crossroads. On the surface, everything seems placid: she claims that she and her diffident but charming husband, Philip, don't want children, and that she's happy with their found family of arty New Yorkers, who compensate for the parents she barely knows in Seoul. However, Jin believes she's cursed by the unquiet spirit of an ancestor, a kisaeng paid to keep men company, who fell in love with the firstborn son of an illustrious Korean clan and died vowing revenge against the family that denied the couple's love. When Jin meets Lidija Jung, a star ballerina absent from the stage following a mysterious leg injury, the two forge an immediate connection. Their chemistry fuels an obsession in Jin, and as the women's growing intimacy begins to jeopardize her career, identity, and marriage, she considers her generational trauma and wonders, could Lidija be the kisaeng's revenge? Hypnotic and disquieting, this slow burn will stick in readers' minds.
