Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

Kim Jiyoung is an ordinary woman: born in Seoul in 1982, a diligent student, a competent office worker, now a wife and the mother of a small daughter, having left her job to raise her. Then she begins, without warning, to speak in the voices of other women — her own mother, a friend who has died — as though their lives are surfacing through hers. Alarmed, her husband sends her to a psychiatrist, and it is through that clinical frame that her story is told.

Reconstructed as a kind of case file, the novel walks back through Kim Jiyoung's life to trace the countless small and large ways that being a woman in South Korea has shaped and constrained her: preference for sons, everyday harassment, workplace discrimination, the quiet erasure of her ambitions after marriage and motherhood. Nothing that happens to her is extraordinary, which is precisely the point.

Cho Nam-ju's spare, deliberately flat novel became a cultural phenomenon and a lightning rod in South Korea's debates about gender. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 reads like sociology as much as fiction, using one unremarkable life to make an accumulated, quietly devastating case about the weight of ordinary sexism.