Cho Nam-joo is a former television scriptwriter. In the writing of this book she drew partly on her own experience as a woman who quit her job to stay at home after giving birth to a child. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is her third novel. It has had a profound impact on gender inequality and discrimination in Korean society, and has been translated into 18 languages.
"A dystopian thriller with a series of intimate character sketches that form a portrait of a community. (Imagine ""Winesburg, Ohio"" set in ""1984."")... Cho draws touching portraits of her discarded denizens... illuminat[ing] the systemic enforcement of class in the same way that ""Kim Jiyoung"" revealed gender inequality.... An affecting portrait of people doing their best to survive in a world that would rather pretend they didn't exist.--Lincoln Michel ""New York Times Book Review"" What is it called again when dystopian fiction seems too uncomfortably plausible: Horror? Speculative fiction? A wake-up call? Treading in territories visited over time by Dickens, Orwell, Atwood, Ishiguro, Squid Game, and Parasite, Cho recounts--in specific and painstaking detail--the miserable lives endured by the many residents of the Saha housing complex... This successor to Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (2020), Cho's chronicle of the misogynistic forces behind South Korea's #MeToo movement--a finalist for the National Book Award--addresses another equally corrosive social horror. Read. Weep. Learn.--Kirkus Reviews, starred review"