I'll Be Right There

By Kyung-Sook Shin, Sora Kim-Russell (translator),

Book cover of I'll Be Right There

Book description

Both a coming-of-age story and a love story, I'LL BE RIGHT THERE follows four friends who meet in the 1980s, at university in Seoul. Times are tough - South Korea is still a military dictatorship - and the group cling to each other, falling in and out of love. As…

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Why read it?

1 author picked I'll Be Right There as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Diane Lefer

Author

I fall hard for novels about intense friendships and loyalty. I’ve never been to Korea, but it was easy for me to relate to the protagonist, Jung Yoon, whose personal growth is influenced by her study of European culture, much as my own immersion in Latin American culture continues to inform my life.

Here again, a gap in most Americans’ knowledge gets filled in. Shin’s haunting and poetic novel offers a bracing account of the student protests in South Korea in the ’80s, with repression, deaths, and disappearances at the hands of the US-supported dictatorship. The politics are eye-opening, but…

From Diane's list on for recovering erased history.