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News From Nowhere Radical & Community Bookshop

not-for-profit - a workers'co-op - committed to social justice | 96 Bold Street, Liverpool L1 4HY - 0151 708 7270

Princess Bari

by Hwang Sok-yong - £9.99  Garnet Publishing Ltd (Periscope) (2015)
paperback    ISBN 13: 9781859641743 | ISBN 10: 1859641741

In a drab North Korean city, a seventh daughter is born to a couple longing for a son. Abandoned hours after her birth, she is eventually rescued by her grandmother. The old woman names the child Bari, after a legend telling of a forsaken princess who undertakes a quest for an elixir that will bring peace to the souls of the dead.
 
As a young woman, frail, brave Bari escapes North Korea and takes refuge in China before embarking on a journey across the ocean in the hold of a cargo ship, seeking a better life. She lands in London, where she finds work as a masseuse. Paid to soothe her clients' aching bodies, she discovers that she can ease their more subtle agonies as well, having inherited her beloved grandmother's uncanny ability to read the pain and fears of others. Bari makes her home amongst other immigrants living clandestinely. She finds love in unlikely places, but also suffers a series of misfortunes that push her to the limits of sanity. Yet she has come too far to give in to despair.
 
Princess Bari is a captivating novel that leavens the grey reality of cities and slums with the splendour of fable. Hwang Sok-yong has transfigured an age-old legend and made it vividly relevant to our own times.

(Price & availability last checked: May 2015)

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In booklists: Fiction and Poetry: Immigration, Refugees and Asylum Seekers, World Fiction - North Korea, Writers by Surname - S, World Fiction - Asia, World Fiction - China,
In categories: Fiction, Anti-Racism, Poetry & Writing, World - Asia,

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