Welcome To The Hyunam-dong Bookshop
By Hwang Bo-reum, translated by Shanna Tan
Fiction/Bloomsbury UK/Hardcover/320 pages/$32.74/Amazon SG (amzn.to/46242gd)
3 stars
Book lovers who read this novel will come out of it fantasising about their ideal bookstore. They might even walk away with a few nifty ideas about how to run one.
In Welcome To The Hyunam-dong Bookshop, Yeongju – who once threw herself into reading to mend a broken childhood friendship – opens a bookstore in a quiet neighbourhood to escape from a life that was “siphoning her soul away”.
Throughout the book, the sensitive Yeongju grapples with the many aesthetic and practical challenges of being a new bookseller. Should her bookstore sell books she dislikes? What are the principles of recommending a book to a customer? How can she turn her bookstore into not just a business, but also a cultural space?
Translated by Singaporean translator Shanna Tan, the prose makes for a breezy read and flows with a lightness befitting this uplifting slice-of-life novel. The book was released in October and debuted at No. 2 on The Straits Times’ bestsellers list.
Although South Korean Hwang Bo-reum is a published essayist, this is her debut novel.
In this book, she retains some of her essayist self, which can be a double-edged sword since the chapters read like disparate mini quasi-philosophical essays which do not ultimately cohere into a compelling narrative.
The chapter titles clue you into this: All Books Are Equal, How We View Work, A Life Surrounded By Good People.
Those looking for a clear arc of character development will not find it here, but dip into each stand-alone chapter, and the reader will appreciate the psychology of the bookseller and her role in wider culture.
The book’s cast of quirky characters can be charming in themselves too. There is Minjun, for example, a high-flier who decides to leave the rat race and become the bookstore’s dedicated barista – an unlikely mirror of Yeongju.
Like South Korean best-selling author Baek Se-hee’s I Want To Die But I Want To Eat Tteokbokki – which was translated by Tan’s mentor Anton Hur – Welcome To The Hyunam-dong Bookshop touches on issues of mental health.
Besides a glimpse into book-selling, this book is likely to spark a greater conversation on burnout and a hyper-competitive work culture, with snappy quotable bits that tap the zeitgeist of the overworked.
As a member of a book club in Yeongju’s bookshop says in a session on David Frayne’s The Refusal Of Work: “It pisses me off that the old fogeys in the ivory tower are being paid astronomical sums, and here we are, earning a pittance. Honestly, aren’t the worker ants like us the ones keeping the company running like clockwork?”
By turns saccharine and punchy, Welcome To The Hyunam-dong Bookshop is a book to dip in and out of – a warm, fuzzy comfort read for the burnt-out reader.
If you like this, read: The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods (HarperCollins, 2023, $20.47, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3QSopIG). A lost bookshop on a street in Dublin reveals its secrets to three strangers.
