City of Ash and Red

"Kafkaesque . . . Those with a taste for creepy suspense will be rewarded."―Publishers Weekly

“Kim-Russell’s ability to replicate Pyun’s stifling terror repeats here . . . Stripped of identity, language, and ethics, the cost of survival for Pyun’s protagonist proves to be his very humanity. A slap-in-the-face parable of the perils of society failures. Pyun’s suffocating tale reveals a future all too possible and real.”―Booklist

“In this tautly knit novel by a brilliant stylist, a world of darkness you’d never want to encounter in real life unfolds mysteriously before your eyes. Soon you’ll find yourself gripped by the fear that what the protagonist experiences could happen to you. Yet, captivated by the enthralling writing and brutal imaginings, you won’t be able to put the book down until you’ve experienced its darkness to the very end."―Kyung-sook Shin, Man Asian Prize–winning author of Please Look After Mom and The Court Dancer

"In the tradition of Kafka, Camus, and Murakami, Pyun takes us on an unflinching, intensely visceral journey through the dark and nightmarish underbelly of our mundane world.”―Heinz Insu Fenkl, author of the PEN/Hemingway Award finalist Memories of My Ghost Brother

“As a story of one man's struggle to maintain sanity against the odds, it's. . . consistently gripping.”―Kirkus Reviews

“A story of loss so affecting that it borders on existential vertigo.”―Sunyoung Park, associate professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Gender Studies, USC

“City of Ash and Red is a tale of survival and ruin that leaves no room for even a single drop of comfort to seep in. Pyun builds an airtight masterpiece of agony and mystery with her masterfully crafted sentences, and she colors it with the ash-gray of ruin and the fiery red of life.”―Korea Economic Daily 

“A story of modern humanity’s survival and downfall as told through the tale of a man who finds his life ruined for reasons he doesn’t understand, in a city rife with disease, soiled by trash, and teeming with rats. . . . [with narrative] tension like a discordant note that jangles the nerves to keep the reader hooked all the way to the last page.”―Munhwa Ilbo 

“Hye-young Pyun has made a name for herself in literature with her exquisite depictions of a world of strange and grotesque imagination. . . . In City of Ash and Red, the central motifs are contagion and rats. . . . Though the world she describes is a fictional one, the story of the extinction and denial of a weak man who must persevere within that world feels all too real. Perhaps this unpleasant sense of reality comes from the realization that our own world is stranger than the monstrous one that Pyun invents, that we ourselves are no stronger than rats. But what can we do? Just as the powerless protagonist must somehow survive in the unknown space of Country C, we too have no choice but to persevere no matter what life throws at us.”―Kukmin Ilbo