Simple Heart

About

Before she was Nana, the name given by her French adoptive parents, she was Esther Pak, a girl in a Korean orphanage. Before that, she was Munju, a small child abandoned on railway tracks in Seoul. She has no memories of her first years, no birth certificate, no family records — only the accumulating layers of names that mark each rupture in her identity. Cho Haejin's novel traces one woman's attempt to reconstruct a self from fragments — traveling back to Korea, learning the language, searching for biological family — while acknowledging that some gaps cannot be filled. The prose is quiet and precise, matching Nana's careful, uncertain steps toward a past that may not want to be found. A novel about the names we're given and the ones we choose — and the lifelong search for the story that connects them.