City of Ash and Red

The second novel by Hye-young Pyun to be published here, following The Hole, winner of the 2017 Shirley Jackson Award, which TIme magazine listed as one of the “Top 10 Thrillers to Read This Summer” and called «A Korean take on Misery
A visceral, atmospheric, and Kafkaesque novel evoking the works of J. G. Ballard and early Ian McEwan as well as Camus's The Stranger. It features an unreliable narrator who finds himself isolated in a foreign country that is experiencing a SARS-like outbreak of disease and an almost apocalyptic breakdown in the streets. At its core, it is a dark and disturbing crime novel with implications that reach far beyond genre.
Korean literature continues to experience a swell with the success of Han Kang. Several other Korean titles will be published in the US in the next couple of years and this title will be well timed.
Author is a rising-star in Korea; she has won several of the most prestigious Korean literary awards for her short story collections, and her novel The Hole was a bestseller there.
Already published in translation in Poland, where it won the award for 2016 Book of the Year, and in France, where it was widely acclaimed.
The agent is raising the author's profile here via her short stories, two of which have been published n The New Yorker and the New Republic so far.