Oprah Daily Reveals the Cover of Cho Nam-Joo’s “Saha”
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At the close of Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we peer ahead to yet more exhilarating fiction and nonfiction by AAPI authors in the coming months. South Korea, in particular, teems with emerging talents, such as 43-year-old novelist-cum-scriptwriter Cho Nam-Joo, whose Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, was a literary revelation, firing up bestseller lists in her own country and winning widespread acclaim in an impeccable English translation by Jamie Chang, longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award. In an exclusive, Oprah Daily reveals the cover for Nam-Joo’s Saha, a dystopian tale set amid a run-down housing complex, charting the fates and foibles of a range of characters as they hold on—barely—in a society devoted to the expansion of inequity. Liveright will publish on November 1.
The novel’s premise is chilling: A vibrant coastal community is crushed beneath the iron boot of corporations. “The village had lived off the fish farm for generations,” Nam-Joo writes. “One year, red tide began to devastate the fish farms, forcing them to close down one by one.” Conglomerates buy up the land at bargain-basement prices, jostling and merging for profits and eventually spawning a city-state, known as Town, founded on the principle of plutocracy. As climate change encroaches, the rich will rule, come hell or high water.
But life flickers on in the Saha Estates, with its box-like apartments, communal faucets, Granny Konnim’s vegetable garden, and a playground where “the swing sets and seesaws were…porous as termite-infested wood.” There’s an empty park; no one can afford a car. When a young woman is found dead nearby, all the residents spring into action. “The Saha Estates plays a central role in the book, so I wanted to treat the building as a character in itself, while also being a vehicle for where the various characters’ stories play out,” designer Yang Kim notes. “The backlit silhouettes of various residents and empty windows reflect the estate’s ever-revolving door of tenants and their stories while also giving off a sense of menace, hinting at the dark secrets and cruelty lying beneath it all.”
While reminiscent of Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea, Cho Nam-Joo’s Saha is its own Orwellian vision: bleak and berserk, brilliant and beautiful.
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