8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster

About

A century-old woman lies dying near the DMZ — and her eight lives unspool across the most violent decades of modern Korean history. She has been a slave, a spy, a mother, a murderer, a lover, an escape artist. Each chapter reshapes everything you thought you knew about her, because survival in Korea's twentieth century required becoming someone new every time the world burned down. Mirinae Lee drew on her great-aunt's story — one of the oldest women to escape North Korea alone — and built a novel that reads like a thriller wrapped in a family saga wrapped in a ghost story. The trickster at its center is one of the most unforgettable characters in recent Korean fiction. This is a book about what it costs to outlive your country's worst century — and whether the person who survives is still the person who started.