Saha

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“Cho Nam-Joo’s Saha is its own Orwellian vision: bleak and berserk, brilliant and beautiful.” “Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982?possesses the urgency and immediacy of the scariest horror thriller—except that this is not technically horror, but something closer to reportage. I broke out in a sweat reading this book.” “As you read, you constantly feel that revolutionary, electric shift, between commonplace and nightmarish. This kind of imaginative work is so important and so powerful.” “Along with other socially critical narratives to come out of Korea, such as Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning film?Parasite, [her] story could change the bigger one.” In a country called Town, a doctor named Su is found dead in an abandoned car. There is only one place the police intend to look for her suspected killer: the Saha Estates. Controlled by a secretive organization of ministers, Town is the safest, richest nation in the world. But it is a society clearly divided into the haves and have-nots, and those who have the very least—who aren’t even considered citizens—live on the Saha Estates. Residents of Saha must squat in moldy units without plumbing or electricity and can only find work doing harsh labor. For many, the apartment complex is a bleak haven for escaping even bleaker pasts—as it was for Jin-kyung and her brother, Do-Kyung, who showed up one day sopping wet and shivering. No one is shocked when a lowlife like Do-Kyung becomes the main suspect in Su’s—a citizen’s—murder. But then Do-Kyung disappears. Isolated in a barren Saha unit, Jin-Kyung makes a choice: she will finally confront a system hellbent on erasing her brother’s existence. To find him, she must rely on her tightlipped neighbors, from the mysterious janitor known as “Old Man,” to Granny Konnim, the community gardener and reluctant midwife, to Woomi, an unwitting test subject at the local clinic. On her quest for the truth, Jin-kyung will uncover a reality far darker than she could have imagined. Written in Cho Nam-Joo’s signature sharp prose, brilliantly translated by Jamie Chang, is a chilling portrait of what happens when we finally unmask our oppressors. • Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2022 From the international best-selling author of comes this chilling dystopian fable for fans of Netflix’s . What is it called again when dystopian fiction seems too uncomfortably plausible: Horror? Speculative fiction? A wake-up call? Treading in territories visited over time by Dickens, Orwell, Atwood, Ishiguro, , and , Cho recounts—in specific and painstaking detail—the miserable lives endured by the many residents of the Saha housing complex… This successor to (2020), Cho’s chronicle of the misogynistic forces behind South Korea’s #MeToo movement—a finalist for the National Book Award—addresses another equally corrosive social horror. Read. Weep. Learn. US

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