Love in the big city

About

Young is sharp-tongued, self-aware, gay, and HIV-positive in a Seoul that barely tolerates any of those things. In four linked novellas, he moves through the relationships that define his twenties: a chaotic friendship with Jaehee, his hard-drinking, free-spirited roommate; a controlling affair with an older man; an agonising reckoning with his Evangelical mother as she's dying of cancer; and finally Gyu-ho, who might be the person he's been looking for — if Young can stop bracing for the next loss. Park's debut became a cultural phenomenon in Korea, the first openly queer novel to break through to mainstream bestseller status, and the reason is on every page: the voice is so alive, so funny and ruthless and tender, that it makes the case for its own existence simply by existing. A novel about how love on the margins is just love.