The DallerGut Dream Department Store is set in a town that exists only in the collective subconscious, a place sleepers arrive at each night without quite knowing how. At its centre is a venerable department store where dreams are stocked, sold and taken home to be worn while sleeping. Each floor carries a different kind: childhood memories on one, food dreams on another, flying, ice skating, stardom, and — most carefully handled of all — the dreams that let a customer meet someone they have lost.
Penny, freshly hired and naive to a fault, arrives for her first day of training under the store's owner, DallerGut. The novel follows her through the counter work and the back offices in episodic chapters, alternating between what she learns on the job, portraits of the dream designers who invent the merchandise, and glimpses of the customers who buy it. The dreams are not escapism so much as inventory with a purpose: something to heal with, something to grow from, something to carry back into waking life.
Miye Lee wrote her debut while working as a semiconductor engineer, funded its first Korean printing by crowdfunding in 2020, and watched it sell more than a million copies. Sandy Joosun Lee's English translation was published by Hanover Square Press in 2024, where it has been read alongside Toshikazu Kawaguchi's Before the Coffee Gets Cold as comfort reading with a gentle melancholy underneath. It is the first of a duology, followed by The DallerGut Dream-Making District.