Hello Baby - by Kim Eui-Kyung (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The bonds between six women undergoing IVF are tested when one announces an unexpected birth in this absorbing, candid novel about what women endure to become mothers

"A multilayered story filled with pain and tears and longing."--Booklist (starred review)

Outside the chat, they had different jobs, personalities, financial backgrounds, but inside, they were all mothers-to-be anxiously awaiting their babies.

At a fertility clinic in Seoul, six women in their thirties and forties become friends. To comfort one another while undergoing IVF, they create the group chat "Hello Baby." Over the course of two years, they share personal stories on their way to motherhood, until one, forty-six-year-old Jung-hyo, suddenly announces she has stopped treatment and disappears from the friend group. But after a year of silence, on Lunar New Year, she drops a text in the chat with the news that she recently gave birth to a baby girl. She invites the group over to celebrate her daughter's birth. With a mix of envy and admiration, the women gather, but their doubts and suspicions threaten a friendship already stressed by uncertainty.

Switching between the six characters--a journalist, a police officer, a vet, a lawyer, and two housewives--this thought-provoking novel explores the social pressure and emotional strain on women struggling to conceive. Written with insight, humor, and great empathy, Hello Baby is a moving portrait of what it means to be a woman today and the lengths some will go to seek motherhood.

Review Quotes

"The stories of the women in Hello Baby sing like a Greek chorus about the pain of longing, of unknown futures, and of relentless hope. As much a study of the yearning and process of having a baby through IVF, this novel illuminates the essentiality of female friendship and mutual support through it all. I loved it."--Anna Hogeland, author of The Long Answer

"Hello Baby circles the hunger to meet one's child, who, before birth, is as mythical as any unicorn. In the secret society of women in the IVF clinic, a tapestry of desire and hope and loss and jealousy emerges. This novel is striking in its honesty and its precision. For the women here, to take the risk of imagining a child is to irrevocably change the future, no matter the outcome of treatment. This is an intimate, searing story."--Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal

"Six women bonded in an IVF group chat in Kim's ultra-contemporary South Korea give voice to their frustrations, vulnerabilities, and strength navigating twenty-first century infertility. In crystalline prose, Kim balances the yearning for motherhood with the exasperating, almost tragicomic weight of overbearing in-laws and checked-out husbands who can't distinguish one medical procedure from another. What remains from their efforts is a steely love and loyalty for each other, even when one woman's victory is not as it seems."--Yoojin Grace Wuertz, author of Everything Belongs to Us

"What a humane, sometimes funny, and always illuminating exploration of the hopeful, painful pursuit of pregnancy and birth that so many people undertake around the world every day. Every character is beautifully drawn; every story gripping and utterly real. This is an important work of art and witness."--Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility

"The women in Kim's wrenching novel are drawn together by their yearning for and thus-far inability to have a baby . . . Each of the women's backstories, achingly translated by [Sora] Kim-Russell, consider what being a woman, wife/partner, daughter-in-law, and someday-mother means in a country with the world's lowest birth rate . . . a multilayered story filled with pain and tears and longing."--Booklist, starred review

About the Author

Kim Eui-Kyung is a novelist and essayist. Her debut novel, Youth Bankruptcy, won the Korea Economic Daily Youth Literary Contest, and her second novel Call Center won the Soorim Literary Award. She also published a short story collection Showroom, set against the backdrop of IKEA and DAISO, and an essay collection The Season Called Life. Hello Baby is her third novel.

Sora Kim-Russell is a literary translator based in Seoul. Her works include the Booker International Prize-nominated Mater 2-10 (co-translated with Youngjae Josephine Bae) and At Dusk by Hwang Sok-yong. Her translation of Pyun Hye-young's The Hole won the Shirley Jackson Award for best novel, and her translations of Pyun's short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine.