Princess Bari
About
Bari, a young girl born in North Korea, escapes famine and death in the 1990s. She crosses into China, survives passage in the hold of a cargo ship, and arrives in London — a city of bewildering cultures, religions, and languages — where she finds work, builds a fragile life, and discovers that the gift of second sight she carried from childhood has followed her across oceans. Hwang Sok-yong reimagines the Korean folktale of Princess Bari — who journeyed to the underworld to save her family — as a contemporary refugee narrative. The mythic framework gives Bari's real-world suffering a transcendent dimension without ever diminishing its concrete, specific horror. A modern quest novel about a girl who crosses borders between nations, between the living and the dead, and between the life she lost and the one she must invent.
