Love in the Big City

BY Sang Young Park / TRanslated from korean BY Anton Hur

Longlisted, 2022 International Booker Prize

Longlisted, 2023 Dublin Literary Prize

A fresh and unique debut novel by the bestselling young star of Korean queer fiction.

Love in the Big City is an energetic, joyful, and moving novel that depicts both the glittering nighttime world of Seoul and the bleary-eyed morning-after.

Young is a cynical yet fun-loving Korean student who pinballs from home to class to the beds of recent Tinder matches. He and Jaehee, his female best friend and roommate, frequent nearby bars where they suppress their anxieties about their love lives, families, and money with rounds of soju and freezer-chilled Marlboro Reds. Yet in time even Jaehee settles down, leaving Young alone to care for his ailing mother and find companionship in his relationships with a series of men, including one whose handsomeness is matched by his coldness, and another who might end up being the great love of his life.

PRAISE

“Sang Young Park is my new favorite writer, as in his work we see life in modern Korea in what I think of as a fuller way, due to the inclusion of queer lives there. This novel is bawdy, hilarious, heartbreaking, fearless.”—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“Love in the Big City is a light-streaked and dazzling novel about all the messy riots of young life. This novel made me want to dance all night and fall in love. Sang Young Park writes honestly, tenderly, and with irresistible humor and charm. I miss his characters already.”—Brandon Taylor, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Real Life

“Sang Young Park’s sharp, funny picaresque follows Young, our charming hero, through his rakish college days and into his still-insouciant thirties, as he drifts through boyfriends, jobs, friends, and most of all, through Seoul. Among the many pleasures of this wonderful novel are Young’s running commentaries about work, class, sex, queer domestic life, contemporary Korean family dynamics, and the literary world he finds himself in. I’m obsessed with this book.”—Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

MORE INFORMATION

• Publication date: 28 October 2021

• Format: B-format paperback (198mm × 129mm)

• Extent: 231pp

• ISBNs: 978-1-911284-65-9 (paperback) / 978-1-911284-64-2 (ebook)

• Rights held: World English - publishing in the US by Grove