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Longlisted - International Booker Prize 2022
A funny, transporting, surprising, and poignant novel that was one of the highest-selling debuts of recent years in Korea, Love in the Big City tells the story of a young gay man searching for happiness in the lonely city of Seoul
Love in the Big City is the English-language debut of Sang Young Park, one of Korea’s most exciting young writers. A runaway bestseller, the novel hit the top five lists of all the major bookstores, went into nine printings, and was praised for its unique literary voice and perspective. It is now poised to capture a worldwide readership.
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 push away their anxieties about their love lives, families, and money with rounds of soju and ice-cold Marlboro Reds that they keep in their freezer. Yet over time, even Jaehee leaves Young to settle down, leaving him alone to care for his ailing mother and to 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.
A brilliantly written novel that takes us into the glittering nighttime of Seoul and the bleary-eyed morning after with both humor and emotion, Love in the Big City is a wry portrait of millennial loneliness as well as the abundant joys of queer life.
Author: Sang Young Park
Paperback Published 15 November 2022 240 pages
Originally published in hardcover 25 November 2021
Read and Recommended by Hendri:
"This first English-debut of a young South Korean writer chronicles the coming-of-age story of a gay man, Young, told through his relationship with Jaehee (his rebellious female best friend), his mother dying with cancer, and his boyfriend, Gyu-Ho. Together with Jaehee, the two friends push against social norms and boundaries that restrict them from being who they are, until one day Jaehee decides to get married. After jumping from one man to another man on Tinder and dealing with his mother’s illness, Young also eventually falls in love with Gyu-Ho, who is struggling to make a living in the city. Young and Gyu-Ho share their life together and carve out their own space in the world that denies their existence until one day Gyu-Ho must leave everything behind. With the tender memories of Gyu-Ho, Young survives by pouring recollections of Gyu-Ho into his own writings…."
“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
“I am completely smitten with Young, the brutally honest protagonist of Sang Young Park’s exciting new novel, Love in the Big City. This is a book that reveals its depths slowly, carefully offering details which resonate throughout the entire work. I loved growing older with Young, and I was continually surprised by his capacity for love and disappointment. This is rich, brilliant territory that will move queer literature forward.”—Garrard Conley, New York Times-bestselling author of Boy Erased