Apartment Women

About

Yojin moves with her family into the Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments — a government complex outside Seoul designed to boost the national birth rate. Residents agree to have at least two more children over the next decade. In exchange: subsidized housing, communal childcare, and the slow, suffocating pressure of a community built on reproductive obligation. Four women navigate this experiment, each with different ambitions and limits. Gu Byeong-mo writes social satire with the precision of a sociologist and the fury of someone who has sat through one too many conversations about women's "natural" roles. The apartment complex becomes a pressure cooker for every unspoken tension around motherhood, labor, and who really raises children. A novel that takes the question "it takes a village" and asks: what if the village is a trap?