Please Look After Mother

Description

PLEASE LOOK AFTER MOTHER is about So-nyo, a wife and mother, who has lived a life of sacrifice and compromise. A few years before the novel begins she suffered a stroke, leaving her vulnerable and often confused. Now, travelling from her home village in the countryside to the Seoul of her grown-up children, she is separated from her husband as the doors close on a packed train. Her children and husband desperately follow every lead but fail to find So-nyo, last seen wandering into the hustle-and-bustle of Seoul station. The novel is told from four different viewpoints, following So-nyo's husband and two of her children as they lash out at each then grow closer again, each confronting their indifference to So-nyo's pain and loneliness. We also hear the ghostly voice of So-nyo, looking back at her childhood and unfulfilled ambitions, and yearning to be with her own mother - putting herself before her husband and children even if only in death.

Author description

Shin Kyung-sook was born in a remote province of Korea to parents who worked the fields. She left school aged 16 and was sent to work at a factory in Seoul. Here she read books in secret under the conveyor belt and saved to enrol in evening classes. She made her debut as a writer at the age of 22 and has won every major Korean literary prize since. Combining huge critical and commercial success, she is a major literary figure in Korea, and a pioneer of fiction with a strong emotional undertow.