South Korea’s emergence from military dictatorship in the late 70s is little-known in Australia. This great novel set around the Gwangju uprising gives some idea of the sacrifices many ordinary Koreans made to achieve democracy.
Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend’s corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma. Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless. A controversial bestseller and award-winning book in Korea.