OZY / December 05, 2020

 Every year when the holidays roll around, many of us get a rare, much-needed break from the world. In this issue of OZY’s Weekender we want to help you escape. Here are the 25 best books of 2020 from every continent. 

Chicago Review of Books / December 08, 2020

In the spirit of the holiday season, I’d like to share a few gift ideas to help your loved ones get out of the 2020 funk and into something meaningful. In these novels, you’ll find people like us—in a weird world—figuring how to survive, how to get back to the mountains, and what it means to be human.

Refinery29 / December 19, 2020

There's a pretty good chance any summer travel plans you'd had for this year might have needed to be curtailed (if not fully canceled), but that doesn't mean you should stay away from this mordantly witty novel that touches on everything from the rise of "dark tourism" to sexual predators in the office to climate change.  

The Spectator / July 04, 2020

Disaster tourism allows people to explore places in the aftermath of natural and man-made disasters. Sites of massacres and concentration camps can be visited; tours operate around Chernobyl, Centralia — the city in America that is perpetually on fire — Aleppo and Fukushima. Tourists can ‘experience’ what it is like to live in a war zone, in extreme poverty or a place emptied by nuclear fallout, and then return to the safety of their homes.

The Irish Times / July 05, 2020

The Irish News / July 08, 2020

BOOK OF THE WEEK: The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-Eun is published in hardback by Serpent's Tail, priced £12.99 (ebook £5.99) A BIZARRE but intriguing slip of a book, The Disaster Tourist will make you feel rather content with the prospect of staycations for the foreseeable. Yona Ka is an expert in making disaster zones into engrossing tourist destinations, until she speaks out about sexual harassment at work and is then sent to the sink-hole ridden island of Mui. Only the place is rigged, and getting out alive becomes increasingly difficult.

The Guardian / July 09, 2020

Following a spate of recent fiction considering the strange intersection of our work and leisure lives – novels such as Ling Ma’s apocalyptic satire Severance and Sayaka Murata’s oddly affecting Convenience Store Woman – The Disaster Tourist offers up another fresh and sharp story about life under late capitalism.

The Times / July 16, 2020

BOOK OF THE MONTH Shaw, a middle-aged man, has got himself a room in a shared house in a shabby area of southwest London in a sinister version of modern Britain, broke, divided and paranoid. He’s got a job — at least, he thinks it’s a job, running errands for a man who has self-published a book called Journeys of Our Genes. Shaw’s even got a lover, though he doesn’t quite know what to do with her, which probably explains why Victoria is leaving town for her dead mother’s house in Shropshire.

Limerick Leader / July 18, 2020

Yona Ka is an expert in making disaster zones into engrossing tourist destinations, until she speaks out about sexual harassment at work and is then sent to the sink-hole ridden island of Mui. Only the place is rigged, and getting out alive becomes increasingly difficult.

Leitrim Observer / July 20, 2020

This week’s bookcase includes reviews of The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-Eun and Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld. Imagine a world in which Hillary Clinton didn’t marry Bill, and discover what life inside prison can be like for women…