You-Jeong Jeong

You-Jeong Jeong is a South Korean author who has established herself as one of the most compelling voices in Korean psychological thriller writing — a novelist who constructs claustrophobic narratives of guilt, obsession, and the lies families tell themselves with impressive craft. Her novel The Good Son (2016) opens with a young man waking to find his mother dead and blood on his hands, but no memory of the night before, and proceeds with the terrible logic of a nightmare from which there may be no honest exit.

Her earlier novel Seven Years of Darkness is similarly intense in its construction and its moral ambiguity. Jeong writes thrillers that are genuinely literary — concerned with character and psychology as much as with plot mechanics — and her work has found an enthusiastic international readership.