A funny, transporting, surprising, and poignant novel that was one of the highest-selling debuts of recent years in Korea, Love in the Big City tells the story of a young gay man searching for happiness in the lonely city of Seoul
Love in the Big City is the English-language debut of Sang Young Park, one of Korea’s most exciting young writers. A runaway bestseller, the novel hit the top five lists of all the major bookstores, went into twenty-six printings, and was praised for its unique literary voice and perspective. It is now poised to capture a worldwide readership.
Young is a cynical yet fun-loving Korean student who pinballs from home to class to the beds of recent Tinder matches. He and Jaehee, his female best friend and roommate, frequent nearby bars where they push away their anxieties about their love lives, families, and money with rounds of soju and ice-cold Marlboro Reds that they keep in their freezer. Yet over time, even Jaehee leaves Young to settle down, leaving him alone to care for his ailing mother and to find companionship in his relationships with a series of men, including one whose handsomeness is matched by his coldness, and another who might end up being the great love of his life.
A brilliantly written novel that takes us into the glittering nighttime of Seoul and the bleary-eyed morning after with both humor and emotion, Love in the Big City is a wry portrait of millennial loneliness as well as the abundant joys of queer life.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Love in the Big City is the English-language debut of Sang Young Park, one of Korea’s most exciting young writers. A runaway bestseller, the novel hit the top five lists of all the major bookstores, went into twenty-six printings, and was praised for its unique literary voice and perspective. It is now poised to capture a worldwide readership.
Young is a cynical yet fun-loving Korean student who pinballs from home to class to the beds of recent Tinder matches. He and Jaehee, his female best friend and roommate, frequent nearby bars where they push away their anxieties about their love lives, families, and money with rounds of soju and ice-cold Marlboro Reds that they keep in their freezer. Yet over time, even Jaehee leaves Young to settle down, leaving him alone to care for his ailing mother and to find companionship in his relationships with a series of men, including one whose handsomeness is matched by his coldness, and another who might end up being the great love of his life.
A brilliantly written novel that takes us into the glittering nighttime of Seoul and the bleary-eyed morning after with both humor and emotion, Love in the Big City is a wry portrait of millennial loneliness as well as the abundant joys of queer life.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"Sang Young Park is my new favorite writer, as in his work we see life in modern Korea in what I think of as a fuller way, due to the inclusion of queer lives there. This novel is bawdy, hilarious, heartbreaking, fearless." - Alexander Chee
"Sang Young Park’s sharp, funny picaresque follows Young, our charming hero, through his rakish college days and into his still-insouciant thirties, as he drifts through boyfriends, jobs, friends, and most of all, through Seoul. Among the many pleasures of this wonderful novel are Young’s running commentaries about work, class, sex, queer domestic life, contemporary Korean family dynamics, and the literary world he finds himself in. I’m obsessed with this book." - Andrea Lawlor
"I love this book. I couldn’t stop talking about it with my friends while I was reading it. My friends are smart, queer, long suffering, badly loved even when they are in relationships, economically oppressed, urban, have straight best friends, get fat, are overly attached to their mothers, nursed their dying mother, have lots of sex, have no sex. Got a job and hated it, got more education, met someone in class, are obsessed with that person even though they are not interested in my friend at all. This writer, Sang Young Park, is one of my friends and everyone wants to read this book. We’re happy, we’re suffering, the condition is global." - Eileen Myles
"How could a story be as intense as this, as fresh as this? Page after page, we discover contradictory emotions that are both surprising and beautiful. I was so eager to read on that my fingers turned each new page before I’d finished the last. I hope he writes another novel that inspires such hard and fast intimacy." - Kyung-Sook Shin
"Love in the Big City is a light-streaked and dazzling novel about all the messy riots of young life. This novel made me want to dance all night and fall in love. Sang Young Park writes honestly, tenderly, and with irresistible humor and charm. I miss his characters already." - Brandon Taylor
"Sang Young Park’s sharp, funny picaresque follows Young, our charming hero, through his rakish college days and into his still-insouciant thirties, as he drifts through boyfriends, jobs, friends, and most of all, through Seoul. Among the many pleasures of this wonderful novel are Young’s running commentaries about work, class, sex, queer domestic life, contemporary Korean family dynamics, and the literary world he finds himself in. I’m obsessed with this book." - Andrea Lawlor
"I love this book. I couldn’t stop talking about it with my friends while I was reading it. My friends are smart, queer, long suffering, badly loved even when they are in relationships, economically oppressed, urban, have straight best friends, get fat, are overly attached to their mothers, nursed their dying mother, have lots of sex, have no sex. Got a job and hated it, got more education, met someone in class, are obsessed with that person even though they are not interested in my friend at all. This writer, Sang Young Park, is one of my friends and everyone wants to read this book. We’re happy, we’re suffering, the condition is global." - Eileen Myles
"How could a story be as intense as this, as fresh as this? Page after page, we discover contradictory emotions that are both surprising and beautiful. I was so eager to read on that my fingers turned each new page before I’d finished the last. I hope he writes another novel that inspires such hard and fast intimacy." - Kyung-Sook Shin
"Love in the Big City is a light-streaked and dazzling novel about all the messy riots of young life. This novel made me want to dance all night and fall in love. Sang Young Park writes honestly, tenderly, and with irresistible humor and charm. I miss his characters already." - Brandon Taylor
Visitors also looked at these books
Used availability for Sang Young Park's Love in the Big City