The Hole: A Novel

Winner of the 2017 Shirley Jackson Award Named One of the Top 10 Thrillers to Read This Summer by Time Magazine. In this tense gripping novel by a rising star of Korean literature Oghi has woken from a coma after causing a devastating car accident that took his wifes 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 award-winning author Hye-young Pyuns 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.