WORLD FICTION  | Daily Mail Online

KIM JIYOUNG, BORN 1982

by Cho Nam-Joo translated by Jamie Chang (Scribner £12.99, 176 pp)

Written in just two months by South Korean TV scriptwriter Cho Nam-Joo, this has sold more than a million copies worldwide and bears all the hallmarks of a lived experience, as it tells the all-too-familiar tale of a smart woman being slowly crushed by constant, inescapable sexism.

Beginning with Kim Jiyoung’s childhood, where her grandparents always favoured her younger brother over her and her sister, to her secondary school days, where slimy male pupils and teachers groped the girls, to her first job at a marketing agency, where the women are paid less and expected to flirt with clients, she is undermined and undervalued at every turn.

When marriage and motherhood are added to the mix, her already fragile sense falters, tipping her into madness.

The prose is as succinct as a clinical report, but beneath the analytical detachment is a roiling rage that compellingly captures Kim Jiyoung’s frustrations.

TYLL

by Daniel Kehlmann translated by Ross Benjamin (Riverrun £18.99, 352 pp)

Anarchic trickster Tyll Ulenspiegel capers out of German medieval folklore and into the Thirty Years’ War in Central Europe from 1618 to 1648. In Kehlmann’s capable hands, Tyll becomes a sinister agent provocateur, who wanders through the war-torn countryside putting on plays and indulging in random acts of cruelty.

Told from a variety of perspectives, and with an engaging narrative that zips back and forward in time, Tyll remains as unknowable as the forest spirit he believes himself to be. He escapes witch hunters, loses himself in woods and snowstorms, is buried in a mine and eventually entertains the exiled King and Queen of Bohemia, whose mistakes sparked the long-running battle.

Kehlmann’s prose is elegant, but the brutality of the conflict is inescapable, as hamlets and villages are burnt and pillaged and the dead are heaped on the battlefield.

WINTER IN SOKCHO

by Elisa Shua Dusapin translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins (Daunt Books £9.99, 224 pp)

The bustling seaside resort of Sokcho in South Korea is desolate in winter, a liminal landscape with shuttered shops, empty streets and a penetrating cold that makes the beaches oppressive; it’s the perfect backdrop for this quietly haunting debut.

A young, aimless French-Korean woman, dissatisfied with her life and her appearance, is whiling away her time working in a run-down guesthouse.

She has a close relationship with her mother, who works in the fish market, and a lacklustre one with her boyfriend, who wants to be a model, so her interest is piqued when an enigmatic French graphic novelist, Kerrand, arrives, wanting to base his next book in Sokcho.

It’s a graceful, slow drift of a novel where nothing much happens; she eats her mother’s food, watches as Kerrand sketches her town in a way that’s unrecognisable to her, and contemplates her own wavering emotions with lonesome, chilly acuity.

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