The Hole

Winner of the 2017 Shirley Jackson Award. Named One of the Top 10 Thrillers to Read This Summer by Time Magazine. Misery meets The Vegetarian in this psychological thriller about loneliness and the dark truths we try to bury.

In this tense, gripping novel by a star of Korean literature, Oghi has woken from a coma after causing a devastating car accident that took his wife's life and left him paralyzed and badly disfigured. His caretaker is his mother-in-law, a widow grieving the loss of her only child. Oghi is neglected and left alone in his bed. His world shrinks to the room he lies in and his memories of his troubled relationship with his wife, a sensitive, intelligent woman who found all of her life goals thwarted except for one: cultivating the garden in front of their house.

But soon Oghi notices his mother-in-law in the abandoned garden, uprooting what his wife had worked so hard to plant and obsessively digging larger and larger holes. When asked, she answers only that she is finishing what her daughter started.

A bestseller in Korea, The Hole is a superbly crafted and deeply unnerving novel about the horrors of isolation and neglect in all of its banal and brutal forms. As Oghi desperately searches for a way to escape, he discovers the difficult truth about his wife and the toll their life together took on her.

Hye-young Pyun was born in 1972. Sheearned her undergraduate degree in creative writing and graduate degree in Korean literature from Hanyang University. Her published works include the short story collections Aoi Garden, To The Kennels, Evening Courtship, and Night Passes; and the novels City of Ash and Red, They Went to the Western Forest, The Law of Lines, The Hole, and Let The Dead. She has received the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award, the Yi Hyo-Seok Literature Prize, the Today’s Young Writer Award, the Dong-in Literary Award, the Yi Sang Literary Award, and the Contemporary Literature (Hyundai Munhak) Award. Her novel TheHole was the 2017 winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, and City of Ash and Red was an NPR Great Read. In 2019, she was awarded the Kim Yujeong Literary Award for her short story ＂Hotel Window.＂ Her short stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and Words Without Borders. She currently teaches creative writing at Myongji University and lives in Seoul, Korea.

Sora Kim-Russell’s translations include, besides The Hole, City of Ash and Red, and The Law of Lines by Hye-young Pyun, Un-su Kim’s The Plotters; Hwang Sok-yong’s At Dusk, which was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize; and Suah Bae’s Nowhere to be Found. Her full list of publications can be found at sorakimrussell.com. She lives in Seoul, South Korea.