Hardback: The Good Son (2018) is inspired by a true story and is translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim.
Yu-jin is a good son, a model student and a successful athlete. But one day, he wakes up covered in blood. There is no sign of a break-in and there is a body downstairs. It is the body of someone who Yu-jin knows all too well.
Yu-jin struggles to piece together the fragments of what he can remember from the night before. He suffers from regular seizures and blackouts. He knows he will be accused if he reports the body, but what to do instead? Faced with an unthinkable choice, Yu-jin makes an unthinkable decision.
Through investigating the murder, reading diaries and looking at his own past and childhood, Yu-jin discovers what has happened. The police descend on the suburban South Korean district in which he lives. The body of a young woman is discovered. Yu-jin has to go back, right back, to remember what happened, back to the night he lost his father and brother, and even further than that.
The Good Son deals with the dark side of family life, and asks the question: how far will you go to protect your children from themselves? How well does a mother know her son?
About the author: You-jeong Jeong was born in Hampyeong, South Korea. She initially trained and worked as a nurse. She is now South Korea's leading writer of psychological crime and thriller fiction and is often compared to Stephen King and Raymond Chandler. You-jeong is the author of four novels including Seven Years of Darkness, which was named one of the top ten crime novels of 2015 by the German newspaper Die Zeit. Seven Years of Darkness is available in English on 7 May 2020!
Her work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Thai and Vietnamese. The Good Son is the first of her books to be translated into English.
About the translator: Chi-Young Kim is the translator of the New York Times bestseller Please Look After Mother by Kyung-sook Shin, as well as fiction by Sun-mi Hwang, J M Lee and Young-ha Kim, among many others. She lives in Los Angeles, California.
Rating: 3/5
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