Folklorn

Elsa Park is a particle physicist working at a neutrino observatory in Antarctica. She has spent her career putting distance between herself and her family's ghosts, and she believes the distance is working. Then the spectral woman in the snow, her imaginary friend from childhood, comes back for her.

Elsa's mother, who is now catatonic, once told her that the women in their line are doomed to live out the stories of their ancestors in Korean myth and legend. Elsa also has a more ordinary inheritance to fear: the mental illness and generational trauma that run through her immigrant family.

When her mother ends a silence of ten years and tragedy follows, Elsa returns to her childhood home in California. Her relatives are struggling with troubles of their own. Among them, she works through the handwritten pages of her mother's dark stories, which deal with women's desire and rage, magic that is suppressed, stolen or punished, and the hunger for revenge.

The book is a genre-crossing family saga that moves between continents and blends ghost story, myth retelling and science. It is about Korean American identity, inherited pain and the love that holds a damaged family together. Expect a serious tone, with the supernatural and the scientific treated as equally real.