8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $1.99
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
“Fantastically original doesn’t begin to describe this exhilarating globe-spanning, decade-hopping masterpiece. Lee has achieved the impossible—from a fractured century of agonies and betrayals, she has woven a novel of immense beauty and regeneration.” — Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Winner of the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing
Longlisted for the Women's Prize in Fiction.
Longlisted for the 2024 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, Best Published Novel
Joining the acclaimed ranks of Pachinko and A Woman is No Man, a riveting and genre-bending debut of love and survival, set in the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea.
Life near the North Korean border is a zero-sum game, an ongoing battle in which you either win or you lose. This dangerous, shadowed netherworld is home to an unforgettable woman known only as the “trickster.”
Inspired by the story of Lee’s great aunt, one of the oldest women to escape alone from North Korea, 8 Lives of a Century Old Trickster consists of eight dark and spellbinding chapters that follow this remarkable character and her family as they struggle to survive during the most turbulent times of modern Korean history. Mirinae Lee’s trickster is a shapeshifter—throughout the course of these interconnected chapters she is a slave, an escape artist, a murderer, a terrorist, a spy, a lover, and a mother—a woman who must often choose the unthinkable to survive war and conquest in Korea. Her story is a beguiling, complex tale of love and survival that will keep you riveted—and speculating—until the very end thanks to Lee’s brilliant talent for sleight of hand.
A fascinating look at survival, trauma, and family, 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster is an incredible literary debut from a bright new talent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lee debuts with an ambitious if overwrought chronicle of a Korean woman who has survived a century of famine and wars. The episodic narrative is framed as a series of interviews between an obituary writer and the elderly Ms. Mook, whose harrowing experiences began at an early age. She describes poisoning her father in 1938, to save her mother from his abuse, and her kidnapping by Japanese soldiers who force her into sexual slavery at a Comfort Station. There, she forms a bond with Yongmal, who helps her endure the violence. When the Americans bomb the station, Ms. Mook escapes. During the Korean War, she works as a translator at the Monkey House, a brothel where Korean girls are forced to have sex with American soldiers. Eventually, she frees the surviving girls and burns the place down. She makes her way to Yongmal's husband in 1955 and allows him to believe she's his long-lost wife, who died at the station from tuberculosis. Though the prose is a bit strained ("The sun was an ebullient eye in the middle of the acid-blue sky"), the protagonist's harrowing and vibrant stories are hard to turn away from. This doesn't always work, but when it does, it hits hard.
