The Hole - by Hye-Young Pyun (Paperback)

About the Book

A man wakes paralyzed from a car accident that kills his wife. He's taken care of solely by his mother-in-law, who begins to show erratic behavior as she digs up her daughter's prized garden.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 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.

Review Quotes

Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award
"A Korean take on Misery," --Time magazine, "Top 10 Thrillers to Read This Summer"

"Hye-young Pyun's The Hole is a masterwork of suspense, and a profound meditation on grief, solitude, and secrecy. At once unsettling and richly moving, The Hole is vital novel, a gift from a wildly inventive writer." --Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me

"By the time Hye-young Pyun's taut psychological thriller The Hole has tightened its grip on the unsuspecting mind, it's too late to escape. The shadows lurking in the novel become manifest, and dark poetic justice reigns. . . . The Hole is an unshakable novel about the unfathomable depths of human need." --Shelf Awareness

"Pyun offers her work to an international audience on her own terms, by speaking directly to the state of alienation made familiar to much of the world by globalization. . . . The amnesiac protagonist is left unnamed because he is us."--Jae Won Chung, Boston Review

"Like Hitchcock or Abe, Pyun peers head on into the unnerving depths of human grief with the most methodical of eye, logically narrating our descent into such a clear, uncanny terror we hope to remind ourselves its only just a book, one wound from end to end with an exquisite magic that refuses to let go." --Blake Butler, author of 300,000,000

"While reading The Hole, you'll find yourself suddenly doubting everything. Pyun is asking us a tough and terrifying question that none can dodge: Is your life safe?" --Kyung-sook Shin, New York Times bestselling author of Please Look After Mom

"Winner of many of Korea's top literary prizes and accolades, Pyun proves to be an effectively chilling storyteller whose expert narrative manipulations should earn new followers." --Booklist

"An absorbing look at the struggle to find meaning in life's little passages, arguments, and disagreements."--SF Book Review

"[Be] wary; you'll be thinking and dreaming this novel long after you've put it down." --Words Without Borders July 2017 Watchlist

"A claustrophobic, riveting story calculated to get under your skin."--Korean Literature Now

"Fissures in life offer a glimpse of the truth that starts not from others but from us and that we are all oblivious to." --Maeil Business News Korea

"The Hole is rooted in character but has the suspense of a thriller. . . For readers who are unafraid of knowing that our life and our loved ones are strangers to us." --Krys Lee, World Literature Today

"Reminiscent of Stephen King's Misery, Hye-young Pyun's The Hole shows off her unique style of steadily rising terror with this dark tale of a man utterly cut off from his life." --Munhwa Ilbo (Korea)

"[A] disconcerting and often sinister story." --Korea Herald

About the Author

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.