Tailbone

"An unforgettable debut novel, indelible, knowing, powerful, consuming. This marks the start of a major career." --Alexander Chee, author of How To Write an Autobiographical Novel A fierce and gorgeous debut novel about a teenager who runs away from her abusive home to live in a boarding house for single women as a global financial crash threatens the people of Seoul. Set in Seoul in 2008, Tailbone follows the story of an unnamed teenage girl who, after years of struggling with her alcoholic father’s abuse, and what she sees as her mother’s cowardice, decides to run away. At a boarding house for single women, the narrator is pulled into the orbit of one of the other girls living there: an older girl named Juju, whose beauty and hardscrabble determination greatly impress the narrator. But when a global financial crisis reaches Korea, fears of a wider economic collapse bring the city to a standstill. Everything the girls have come to rely on