Best of the Best Book Club: "Winter in Sokcho" by Elisa Shua Dusapin

The Coronado Public Library's Best of the Best Book Club meets regularly on the 4th Wednesday of each month to discuss books that have won major awards. Receive reminder emails about our meeting by registering below. Registration is not required. 

For our April meeting, we will discuss the 2021 National Book Award winner Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin, a novel that explores rifts of identity—personal, cultural, and national—and the fleeting kinship that is possible between solitary strangers.

About Winter in Sokcho

It’s winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. The cold slows everything down. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North’s watchtowers. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape. The two form an uneasy relationship. When she agrees to accompany him on trips to discover an "authentic" Korea, they visit snowy mountaintops and dramatic waterfalls, and cross into North Korea. But he takes no interest in the Sokcho she knows—the gaudy neon lights, the scars of war, the fish market where her mother works. As she’s pulled into his vision and taken in by his drawings, she strikes upon a way to finally be seen. An exquisitely-crafted debut, which won the Prix Robert Walser, Winter in Sokcho is a novel about shared identities and divided selves, vision and blindness, intimacy and alienation. Elisa Shua Dusapin’s voice is distinctive and unmistakable.

About Elisa Shua Dusapin

Elisa Shua Dusapin was born in France in 1992 and raised in Paris, Seoul and Switzerland. Winter in Sokcho (Hiver à Sokcho) is her first novel. Published in 2016 to wide acclaim, it was awarded the Prix Robert Walser and the Prix Régine Desforges and has been translated into six languages.