Book of the Month–May 2012
Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin
Kyung-sook 
Shin recently won'the Man Asian Literary Prize for Please Look After Mom, a story of a family’s search for its matriarch after the woman disappears. Sixty-nine year old So-nyu is lost among the crowds in a subway station in Seoul leaving her family mystified and consumed with guilt. The story is told from the perspectives of different family members as they struggle to cope with the disappearance and question how well they actually know So-nyu. Finally, the story is told in the mother’s own voice in the devastating conclusion.
A bestseller in the author ‘s native South Korea, the foreign rights to the book have been sold in 19 countries.
Also available as:
Large Print
Acknowledgements and Awards
2011: Man Asian Literary Award
Book Reviews
Maclean’s
The New York Times
The Wall Street Journal
About the Author
Kyung-Sook Shin was born in 1963 in a village in Jeolla Province in South Korea. Her paren'ts were farmers who could not afford to send her to high school so when she was 16 she moved to Seoul to live with her older brother. She attended night school while working in an electronics factory. She graduated from the Seoul Institute of the Arts with a creative writing major. Although she has published 7 novels and numerous short stories in South Korea, Please Look After Mom is the first of her works to be translated into English.
Author Interviews
BBC World Service (video)
subject object verb
Read Alikes
If you liked Please Look After Mom, you may also enjoy:
Fiction
Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung
Somebody’s Daughter by Marie G. Lee
Songs for the Missing by Stewart O’Nan
The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee
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