Mater 2–10

About

In contemporary Seoul, a laid-off worker stages a months-long sit-in atop a sixteen-story factory chimney. During the long, lonely nights, he speaks to his ancestors — three generations of Korean workers whose lives span a century of the nation's turbulent history. Through their stories, the personal and political become inseparable: colonial labor, war, industrialization, and the modern precariat all converge in a single family line. Hwang Sok-yong, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, weaves an epic from the most intimate material: the voices of working people talking to each other across time. The chimney becomes a watchtower from which the entire twentieth century is visible — and the twenty-first century's failures become impossible to ignore. A novel that threads a century of Korean history through the eye of a single needle — the stubborn, defiant act of refusing to come down.