I'll Be Right There

About

In 1980s South Korea, amid political revolution and campus protests, Jung Yoon navigates friendship, love, and literature with a small circle of intensely bonded companions. Their professor introduces them to the European writers who provide the language for what they're living through — Rilke, Kafka, Emily Dickinson — while outside the classroom, the military government wages war on its own citizens. Kyung-Sook Shin writes about young intellectuals with the same emotional precision she brought to Please Look After Mom, but the register here is different — more literary, more intimate, more attuned to the way books and friendships become inseparable during the years when both are forming you. A novel about the friends who shaped you during the years when everything — the country, your mind, your heart — was being remade at once.