Winter in Sokcho

Elisa Shua Dusapin

"Winter in Sokcho — a forgotten place between the two Koreas. A girl whose life was given to her by a father she doesn't know and who didn't give her his name. He, who belongs to 'over there', she dreams of him every day in her monotonous life where she works, behind the reception desk of a dilapidated old hotel. A deadly tranquility in Sokcho, and a guest who broke it when he came looking for the lines of his drawings in that forgotten environment. Beyond the sea, rifles are pointed from North Korean watchtowers. And in the sea, fish like the girl, surrender themselves to the current and never reach their destination. The guest also comes from that 'over there'. He carries all his ambiguities and mysteries, and paper he chews whenever inspiration fails him, and ink that cannot form the contours of a woman who is elusive to him. Despite the powerful bright neon lights in the dark town, the pungent smell of the fish market, and the hiss of curiosity and desire, a booby-trapped distance of the forbidden separates the two, and questions that do not aspire to answers, a misty distance laden with crashing emotions that cannot find a shore.
One winter in Sokcho, the frost had another meaning, and a season unlike all other seasons... "In Elisa Dusapin's book, we hear a voice for silence." — Carolina Couto, Shua Dusapin — The Korean-French writer was born in 1992 in Sarlat-la-Canéda, France, and currently resides in Switzerland. Elisa has so far published three novels, the first of which was "Winter in Sokcho" (2016), which won numerous awards, including the National Book Award in New York, among 154 nominated novels."