Search results for ""Author Deborah Smith""
Profile Books Ltd The Accusation: Forbidden Stories From Inside North Korea
In 1989, a North Korean dissident writer, known to us only by the pseudonym Bandi, began to write a series of stories about life under Kim Il-sung's totalitarian regime. Smuggled out of North Korea and set for publication around the world in 2017, The Accusation provides a unique and shocking window on this most secretive of countries. Bandi's profound, deeply moving, vividly characterised stories tell of ordinary men and women facing the terrible absurdity of daily life in North Korea: a factory supervisor caught between loyalty to an old friend and loyalty to the Party; a woman struggling to feed her husband through the great famine; the staunch Party man whose actor son reveals to him the absurd theatre of their reality; the mother raising her child in a world where the all-pervasive propaganda is the very stuff of childhood nightmare. The Accusation is a heartbreaking portrayal of the realities of life in North Korea. It is also a reminder that humanity can sustain hope even in the most desperate of circumstances - and that the courage of free thought has a power far beyond those seek to suppress it.
£8.99
Octopus Publishing Group Grow Your Own Happiness
A toolbox of positive principles, tips and techniques for the ultimate self-care. Science tells us that happiness is 50% genetic, 10% circumstantial and 40% how we think and act. Which means that it is possible to increase our happiness by up to 40%. For anyone wanting to increase their wellbeing, Grow Your Own Happiness shows how positive psychology - the science of happiness- can be used every day. With key principles explained to provide the foundation for change, tests for measuring wellbeing and simple techniques that can easily be applied to a busy lifestyle, as well as case studies, anecdotes and tips, this book provides everything you need to shine.
£13.00
Granta Books The Vegetarian: A Novel
WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 'A strange, painfully tender exploration of the brutality of desire indulged and the fatality of desire ignored... Exquisite' Eimear McBride Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people - dutiful wife and mild-mannered office worker. One day, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares, Yeong-hye decides to become a vegetarian. But in South Korea, where vegetarianism is almost unheard-of and societal mores are strictly obeyed, it is a shocking act of subversion. Yeong-hye's passive rebellion rapidly manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, from sexual sadism to attempted suicide, and in increasingly erotic and unhinged artworks, as all the while she spirals further into her fantasies... Disturbing and beautiful by turns, The Vegetarian is a revelatory novel about modern day South Korea; a tale of shame, desire and our faltering attempts to understand others.
£9.99
Granta Books Human Acts
A riveting, poetic and powerful work from the author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Vegetarian. 'Exquisite, painful and deeply courageous' Philippe Sands, Best Books of the Year, Guardian Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. Amid a violent student uprising a young boy named Dong-ho is killed. As his friend searches for Dong-ho's corpse, we also meet an editor struggling against censorship, a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories, and Dong-ho's grief-stricken mother. Through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope comes a tale of a brutalised people in search of a voice. A modern classic, Human Acts has been both a controversial bestseller and an award-winning book in Korea, and it confirmed Han Kang as a writer of international importance. '[Han Kang's] way of telling about the events of a 10-day insurgency in Gwangju, South Korea in 1980 and its psychological, spiritual and political aftermath opened my eyes' Susie Orbach, Best Books of the Year, Guardian
£9.99
Penguin Books Ltd Greek Lessons
Book of the Year 2023 according to New Yorker, TIME magazine, Kirkus A powerful novel of the saving grace of language and human connection, from the celebrated author of The Vegetarian.'Breathtaking . . . She is simply my favourite living writer to read, and think with, and see the world with' Max PorterIn a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight.Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages.Greek Lessons is a tender love letter to human connection, a novel to awaken the senses, vividly conjuring the essence of what it means to be alive.Translated by Deborah Smith and e. yaewon.'Another stunning gem: quiet, sharply faceted, and devastating' Kirkus'Han Kang is a writer like no other. In a few lines, she seems to traverse the entirety of human experience' Katie Kitamura
£9.99
Granta Books The White Book
'A brilliant psychogeography of grief, moving as it does between place, history and memory... The White Book is a mysterious text, perhaps in part a secular prayer book' Deborah Levy, Guardian SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE From the author of The Vegetarian and Human Acts comes a book like no other. The White Book is a meditation on colour, beginning with a list of white things. But it is also a book about mourning, and of rebirth and the tenacity of the human spirit. It is a stunning investigation of the fragility, beauty and strangeness of life from one of the great literary voices of our time. 'Wonderful. A quietly gripping contemplation on life, death and the existential impact of those who have gone before' Eimear McBride 'The White Book is a profound and precious thing... Han Kang is a genius' Lisa McInerney
£9.99
Granta Publications Ltd The Vegetarian: A Novel
WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 'A strange, painfully tender exploration of the brutality of desire indulged and the fatality of desire ignored... Exquisite.' Eimear McBride Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people - dutiful wife and mild-mannered office worker. One day, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares, Yeong-hye decides to become a vegetarian. But in South Korea, where vegetarianism is almost unheard-of and societal mores are strictly obeyed, it is a shocking act of subversion. Yeong-hye's passive rebellion rapidly manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, from sexual sadism to attempted suicide, and in increasingly erotic and unhinged artworks, as all the while she spirals further into her fantasies... Disturbing and beautiful by turns, The Vegetarian is a revelatory novel about modern day South Korea; a tale of shame, desire and our faltering attempts to understand others.
£9.99
Penguin Random House India Love for Imperfect Things: How to Accept Yourself in a World Striving for Perfection
£14.63
Vintage Publishing Untold Night and Day
'As cryptic and compelling as a fever dream... Bae Suah is one of the most unique and adroit literary voices working today' Sharlene TeoFinishing her last shift at Seoul's only audio theatre for the blind, Kim Ayami heads into the night with her former boss, searching for a missing friend. The following day, she looks after a visiting poet, a man who is not as he seems. Unfolding over a night and a day in the sweltering summer heat, their world's order gives way to chaos, the edges of reality start to fray, and the past intrudes on the present in increasingly disorientating ways. Untold Night and Day is a hallucinatory feat of storytelling from one of the most radical voices in contemporary Korean literature.'Highly original... Once I finished it, much of it slipped into my subconscious' Daily Telegraph
£9.99
UEA Publishing Project Milena, Milena, Ecstatic
Hom Yun's meticulously ordered life of reading books and drinking coffee receives a jolt when a mysterious cultural foundation unexpectedly agrees to fund his film proposal: a blend of fiction and documentary, a tone-poem constructed around a lyrical narrative, set around Scythian graves in the High Altai mountains. Desperate to be taken on as his assistant, the foundation's secretary follows him from their offices and begins a night of crossed wires, dislocation, and reality seen through glass, darkly. One of South Korea's most astonishingly sui generis authors, Bae Suah mixes the cerebral and the pungently physical, the mundane and the wildly surreal, in a characteristically potent blend.
£7.62
Penguin Books Ltd Greek Lessons
Book of the Year 2023 according to New Yorker, TIME magazine, Kirkus A powerful novel of the saving grace of language and human connection, from the celebrated author of The Vegetarian.'Breathtaking . . . She is simply my favourite living writer to read, and think with, and see the world with' Max Porter__________________In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight.Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages.Greek Lessons is a tender love letter to human connection, a novel to awaken the senses, vividly conjuring the essence of what it means to be alive.Translated by Deborah Smith and e. yaewon.__________________'Another stunning gem: quiet, sharply faceted, and devastating' Kirkus'Han Kang's vivid and at times violent storytelling will wake up even the most jaded of literary palates' Independent'Han Kang is a writer like no other. In a few lines, she seems to traverse the entirety of human experience' Katie Kitamura
£15.29