Olives Under the Sun
Korean Title: 태양 아래 올리브
Author: Kim Cho-Yup (김초엽)
Publisher: Giant Book (자이언트북스)
ISBN: 9791191824582
Paperback | 396쪽 pages | 135*197mm | 515g
| Important! Please read before you order! |
| >>>This book is written in Korean. |
About This Book
Kim Cho-yeop, who has opened up unfamiliar worlds and explored the boundaries between humans and nonhumans in The Greenhouse at the End of the Earth and The Delegates, returns with her third novel, Olive Trees Under the Sun. It has been three years since The Delegates, her last full-length novel. This time, the author turns her gaze toward the point where faith and science, belief and doubt, collide. Along that path, she places two people who seem unlikely to ever make a team: a nun and a science YouTuber.
I-re, a nun who travels to the front lines of climate disasters, readily listens to the circumstances of even people she has just met, and whenever there is somewhere she is needed, her body moves before she can think. Solmin, an editor at a science and technology policy magazine and the operator of an anonymous channel called Minot, never overlooks contradictions between words and actions and relentlessly calls out false claims and blind faith disguised in the name of science. For I-re, faith is a way of life ingrained in her as naturally as breathing; for Solmin, religion is something that must be tested against evidence. Despite being so different, the two were once as close as family. Eight years after they parted, leaving each other with the most painful words, a suspicious phone call puts them back on the same road.
The story begins in Korea and moves without pause through Hanoi Airport and a train bound for Laos, then along the Mekong River and into the mountain roads of northern Thailand. Plans go awry, clues lead to more clues, and the two clash at every turn. Yet it is precisely this discord that becomes the engine of the novel. I-re’s first instinct is to save the person standing in front of her, while Solmin’s is to calculate an escape route. Their contrasting approaches sometimes create crises, but they also become the keys to getting out of those very crises.
Olive Trees Under the Sun never loses the momentum of a chase thriller while tracing how two very different people, through repeated collisions, begin to rebuild their relationship. Solmin believes the world can be understood, while I-re finds herself suffocating in the face of things that can never be fully understood and runs away. The two repeatedly fall out of step as they see the world in fundamentally different ways, yet neither can quite bring themselves to turn their backs on the other completely. Through their misalignment, the novel patiently accumulates moments in which they gradually draw closer, asking whether it is possible to remain by each other’s side even without ever fully understanding one another.
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