Excavations
A Novel
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A former journalist turned stay-at-home mother must find her missing husband and protect her children in Excavations, a “sharp, impressive debut about corruption among South Korea’s elite” (The Boston Globe).
A PHENOMENAL BOOK CLUB PICK • A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AND CRIMEREADS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Sae is waiting with two clingy toddlers for her husband to come home from work when she learns of a horrific disaster, the collapse of a massive skyscraper where Jae is an engineer. Minutes, then hours, and then days pass. Speculations of North Korean terrorism and structural instability circulate as possible causes of the Tower’s collapse. No one has seen Jae, but things aren’t adding up. Jae had told Sae he was working on a swimming pool on the top floor, but reports showed he was in the basement, on a different project. The government was involved, but the contractors were missing. Sae—who met Jae when they were students at an anti-government protest and has relied on him as her guiding and steadying hand—is troubled and suspicious.
Leaving the children with her estranged mother, Sae sets out to uncover the truth of what happened to her husband. Her investigation takes her to an upscale club where the proprietor, Myonghee, is not merely supplying booze and girls but also seeking information, for her own purposes, from every drunken businessman who lets corporate secrets slip. As Sae begins to find what she sought, she must ask herself: How well can you truly know the one you love and how is truth shaped by power?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A former journalist journeys into the urban underbelly of 1992 South Korea to track down her missing spouse in this knockout standalone thriller from Michell (The Defections). Sae, who long ago quit her job to care for her two young sons, is anxiously waiting for her husband, Jae, to return from work when she learns that Aspiration Tower, the building Jae had been working on as an engineer, has collapsed. Sae rushes to the scene, where the ruins of the tower resemble "a city blown apart by a bomb." Unsuccessful in locating her husband or his missing business partner, Bae, among the dead or wounded, Sae calls on her atrophied skills as an investigative reporter to find out what happened. Her distress intensifies when she visits the offices of her husband's firm, L&S Engineering, only to find it had moved out months earlier. Flashbacks to the couple's first meetings, as university students, in 1986, effectively enhance the emotional stakes of the investigation. This superior variation on a familiar thriller trope isn't easily forgotten.
