Seopyeonje: The Southerners' Songs

Yi Chung-jun's haunting and disturbing novel is set in the 1950s after the Korean War in the remote south of the country, home of the traditional art of pansori singing, a moving and plangently beautiful style of folk song performed by traveling musicians. The linked stories center on a family of itinerant singers: a boy and his stepfather and half-sister. Believing that his stepfather caused his mother's death, the boy cannot live with the murderous hatred he feels towards him, s