- Title:
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The Vegetarian
- Written by:
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Han Kang
- Read by:
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Janet Song; Stephen Park
- Format:
-
Unabridged CD Audio Book
- Number of CDs:
-
5
- Duration:
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5 hours 15 minutes
- Published:
-
June 28 2018
- Available Date:
-
June 28 2018
- Age Category:
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Adult
- ISBN:
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9781489446107
- Genres:
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Fiction; Contemporary Fiction; Literary Fiction
- Publisher:
-
Bolinda audio
Qty
Format
Price
Bolinda price
Winner The Man Booker Prize 2016
An irresistibly weird and sensuous story of betrayals, transformations and social taboos.
Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more 'plant-like' existence, decides to become a vegetarian, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares.
In South Korea, where vegetarianism is almost unheard-of and societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye's decision is a shocking act of subversion. Her passive rebellion manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, leading her bland husband to self-justified acts of sexual sadism. His cruelties drive her towards attempted suicide and hospitalisation. She unknowingly captivates her sister's husband, a video artist. She becomes the focus of his increasingly erotic and unhinged artworks, while spiralling further and further into her fantasies of abandoning her fleshly prison and becoming – impossibly, ecstatically – a tree.
Fraught, disturbing and beautiful, The Vegetarian is a novel about modern day South Korea, but also a novel about shame, desire and our faltering attempts to understand others, from one imprisoned body to another.
'Sensual, provocative and violent, ripe with potent images, startling colours and disturbing questions. Sentence by sentence, The Vegetarian is an extraordinary experience'.
The Guardian
'Enthralling ... It has a surreal and spellbinding quality, especially in its passage on nature and the physical landscape, so beautiful and so magnificently impervious to the human suffering around it.'
The Independent
'Kang has crafted a wounding, unsettling book ... Han Kang's greatest achievement is crafting a small table from which great things grow.'
Irish Examiner