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The greater concerns of the novel-unrequited love, familial strain, self-discovery-are contextualized through Dusapin’s subtle descriptions of the light in Sokcho, the characterization of a face, the mother’s damp bedsheets. The narrator’s descriptions of Kerrand’s illustrations, “the white space between the lines, the light absorbed by the paper, the snow bursting off the page, real enough to touch,” could just as accurately apply to the novel’s prose. And it is Dusapin’s controlled language that creates the sensory magic of the novel. Since then, it has been translated into six languages, including Aneesa Abbas Higgins’s translation into English. But despite their frustration with each other, they’re both stuck in Sokcho, sleeping in the same bed every Sunday night, like a mother and her newborn.ĭusapin was only twenty-four when Winter in Sokcho, her debut novel, was first published in French in 2016, winning her the Prix Robert Walser and Prix Régine Deforges.

Like the mother’s famed preparation of blowfish, a dish that can be toxic if it’s not handled carefully, each interaction between the two is loaded with love and pain, threatening to spill over into catastrophe with one fatal misstep. As the mother-who works at a nearby fish market-frets about her daughter’s health, career, and stalled lovelife, she’s oblivious to her daughter’s shared anxiety about the same. Making indulgent use of the senses, particularly through food and meals, Dusapin draws out their desperate, feminine, and painfully loving bond. While Winter in Sokcho is centered on the quietly tortured romance between Kerrand and the narrator (whose boyfriend is away in pursuit of a modeling career), Dusapin’s carefully considered approach to emotion is best shown in the relationship between the narrator and her mother. Among the eclectic guests, which include a woman recovering from facial reconstruction surgery and a mountain climber, is a nearly inscrutable French cartoonist, Kerrand. The unnamed narrator-a young woman born to an absent French father and a South Korean mother-works at an old, almost vacant guesthouse.

Somaly Serey, Serey Somalyby Anthony Veasna SoĮlisa Shua Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho is set in a South Korean resort town, “a place oozing winter and fish” in the desolate off-season. Matthew Soules’s Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin: Architecture and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Centuryby Deborah GansĪzareen Van der Vliet Oloomiby Alexandra KleemanĪrthur Jafa and Dana Hoeyby Sascha BehrendtĪnne Anlin Cheng by Shivani Radhakrishnan Rosine Mbakam’s Delphine’s Prayersby Priscilla PosadaĬhris McKim’s Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker by Eugenie DallandĮlisa Shua Dusapin’s Winter in Sokchoby Cecilia Barron Kei Miller's Things I Have Withheldby Rianna Jade Parker