Author Description

Winner of the Shin Dong-yup Prize for LiteratureKim Hye-Jin's incendiary, internationally bestselling debut confronts familial love, duty, mortality, and generational schism through the sharp gaze of a tradition-bound mother faced with her daughter's queer relationship.When a mother allows her thirty-something daughter to move into her apartment, she wants for her what many mothers might say they want for their child: a steady income, and, even better, a good husband with a stable job with whom to start a family.But when Green turns up with her girlfriend, Lane, in tow, her mother is unprepared and unwilling to welcome Lane into her home. In fact, she can barely bring herself to be civil. Having centred her life on her husband and child, her daughter's definition of family is not one she can accept. Green's involvement in a case of unfair dismissal involving gay colleagues from the university where she works is similarly strange to her.And yet when the care home where she works insists that she lower her standard of care for an elderly dementia patient who has no family - who travelled the world as a successful diplomat, choosing work over children - Green's mother cannot accept it. Why should not having chosen a traditional life mean that your life is worth nothing at all?In Concerning My Daughter, translated from Korean by Jamie Chang, Kim Hye-jin lays bare our most universal fears on ageing, death, and isolation, to offer finally a paean to love in all its forms.