The Guardian / March 18, 2020

Born in Seoul in 1965, Bae Suah is one of Korea’s most radical contemporary writers, whose prolific output has won prizes and acclaim both within her home country and abroad. Her fiction is notable for its surrealism, sudden shifts in chronology and lyrical intensity of language, a style no doubt influenced by her translation of writers such as WG Sebald and Fernando Pessoa. One Korean reviewer described Bae’s early novel A Greater Music as “doing violence to the Korean language”: it was this particular line that attracted Deborah Smith, translator of the Booker International prize-winning author Han Kang, to Bae’s subversive writing. Untold Night and Day, translated by Smith, marks the arrival of her heady fiction in the UK for the first time. (..)

Financial Times / January 31, 2020

Untold Night and Day — double vision in a twilight Seoul

Straittimes / February 25, 2020

Bae Suah, who has published more than a dozen novels and short stories since 1993, is one of South Korea's most inventive experimental writers. She stays true to form in Untold Night And Day, blurring the distinction between black and white, and night and day, in an ethereal labyrinth where life unfolds in strange repeated loops and the slippery edges of reality start to fray.

The Guardian / February 24, 2020

Untold Night and Day was first published in Korea in 2013 and is the fourth of Bae Suah’s novels – which number more than a dozen – to be translated into English by Deborah Smith. It is also the first of her books to be published in the UK, arriving at a time when Korean culture is in the spotlight – with the recent success of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite at the Oscars and the launch of Connect, BTS – the K-pop band’s global art project.

stuff / March 21, 2020

On a sweltering day in Seoul, the former actress Kim Ayami works her final shift at an audio theatre for the blind. She wonders what she will do next, "with unemployment staring her in the face and not much time left before her 28th birthday". Bae Suah's Untold Night and Day is not a simple tale of quarter-life crisis, however, but a surreal, disorienting and highly original novel, full of unsolved mysteries, repeated motifs and startling prose. (..)

bookriot / March 02, 2020

If you loved the critically acclaimed and astonishing film Parasite—directed by Bong Joon-ho, with a screenplay cowritten by Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won—and you’re looking for more great Korean artistry to scratch that itch, look no further than the incredible books in translation coming out of South Korea right now. Many of these novels have themes similar to the ones explored in Parasite, some capture the tone and mood of the film, and others feel quite different but have the genius, the same ingenuity of Parasite.

The Telegraph / March 08, 2020

On a sweltering day in Seoul, the former actress Kim Ayami works her final shift at an audio theatre for the blind. She wonders what she will do next, “with unemployment staring her in the face and not much time left before her 28th birthday”. 

big issue / February 21, 2020

When I read a truly great debut novel my heart sings. When I read a novel that dissects race and class with scalpel-like precision, it gives me faith in the future of publishing – an industry once so reticent to acknowledge these issues that now publishes a book with those subjects at its core to great fanfare.

The Spinoff / April 05, 2020

Welcome back to Papercuts, our monthly books podcast hosted by Louisa Kasza, Jenna Todd and Kiran Dass. Well, we’ve all said we wish we had more time to read and now we’ve got what we wished for. Jenna, Kiran and Louisa delve into some book news (that’s not too heavy for our weary heads), book reviews, not books and to-be-read piles. Tune in, switch your brain off and start making some notes for your upcoming post-quarantine reads. Remember to wait for your local to open again! #bookshopswillbeback #waitforyourbookshop

The Spinoff / April 23, 2020

When I was at primary school I was given a tiny doll in a match box. On the matchbox were printed the words Mon Ami. “It means ‘my friend’,” explained my next-door neighbour who was at high school and probably the coolest person I knew.