A Love Story from the End of the World
From the acclaimed author of Beasts of a Little Land and Reese’s Book Club pick City of Night Birds, an exquisite story collection about humans in precarious balance with the natural world.
‘A rare jewel … essential reading for right now’ COCO MELLORS
‘Kim’s work is ambitious, elegant and deeply intellectual’ PANDORA SYKES
What does it mean to live on our miraculous planet?
Vivid, transportive, and heartfelt, each of these ten stories is a reflection of individual choice in the face of manmade apocalypse: in a near-future Seoul encased by a translucent biodome, a civil engineer charged with its upkeep contemplates an arranged marriage. An American painter travels to the South of France and is seduced by an entrepreneur who claims to have unlocked human consciousness. And where the Indian and Pacific Oceans meet, on an island that has turned into a gargantuan landfill from other countries’ waste, a boy has a fateful brush with K-pop superstars.
For readers of Richard Powers, Elif Shafak and Barbara Kingsolver, Juhea Kim’s first story collection views our world from breathtaking heights. A Love Story from the End of the World is an impassioned reminder that our humanity – and our best hope – will always be found in nature.
Praise for Juhea Kim: -
'A rare jewel of a novel that shimmers with beauty, wisdom, and artistry. Propelled by a devourable plot that kept me turning the pages long after I should have been asleep, City of Night Birds is an epic story of ambition, desire, and dance, that feels both like a novel that will be read and loved for the next one hundred years, and essential reading for right now. I could not have loved it more' COCO MELLORS, New York Times bestselling author of Cleopatra and Frankenstein and Blue Sisters -
'Written in lush and evocative prose, Juhea Kim's A Love Story from the End of the World is like a precision cut diamond that fractures light into a spectrum of possible futures on this, our wounded planet. Kim's characters yearn for connection, bargain with the spectres of their own mortality, and burn bright with the insistence that they will thrive, even among the wreckage wrought by our species. Each of these ten stories showcases Kim's finely tuned attention to detail and gift for infusing even the smallest moments with the richness of complex hearts and minds. In the end, despite flights of imagination, Kim's stories ultimately tether us to the earth and demand that we give it our attention. This is an exquisite and essential collection' TALIA LAKSHMI KOLLURI, author of What We Fed to the Manticore -
'In A Love Story from the End of the World, Juhea Kim offers both an unsettling glimpse at what climate change might mean for our planet, and a vision of the transcendent moments of beauty and human connection that make it possible to survive in a changing world' ASH DAVIDSON, author of Damnation Spring -