The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness: A Novel

"Kyung-Sook Shin’s work often inhabits the space between story and reality. This novel — about a girl who isn’t quite her, working in a factory and going to school in the 1970s — is framed with the modern life of “the author,” in a time and place she haunts more than really lives in. Until her youth is laid out and the truth told, she’s trapped in echoes of life: negotiating family in the past, staring at an unfinished manuscript in the future. It’s a story of the pasts that build us, and it makes for one of the most absorbing reads of the year."