Excavations - A Novel

Informationen zum Autor Hannah Michell Klappentext "At home in Seoul, former journalist Sae, is waiting with two clingy toddlers for her husband to come home from work. He has never been this late before. Her children are crying, and Sae, exhausted and anxious, turns on the TV to distract herself. She clicks to the news, which shows a horrific disaster, the collapse of a massive skyscraper where Jae was an engineer. Minutes, then hours, and then days pass. No one has seen Jae, but things aren't adding up. There are rumors that the foundation was unstable. Jae, who was working on a luxury pool at the top floor, was reported to have been working in the basement. The government was involved, the contractors missing. Sae-who met Jae when they were students at an anti-government protest and has relied on him as her guiding and steadying hand-is troubled, terrified, and...suspicious. Leaving the children with her estranged mother, Sae sets out to uncover the truth of what happened to her husband. Her investigation takes her to an upscale club where the proprietor, Myonghee, is not merely supplying booze and girls but also seeking information, for her own purposes, from every drunken businessman who lets corporate secrets slip. As Sae and Myonghee begin to find what they sought, they must both ask themselves where accusation ends and guilt begins"-- Leseprobe Collapse 1992 Jae was a man of his word, and he had promised Sae he would be home at six o’clock. Sae glanced at the green cuckoo clock in their kitchen, waiting to see the small bird pop out to announce the hour. The last half hour before he returned every evening was the hardest. It was so close to the end and yet still so much in the thick of waiting. The children were growing tired, their careless movements more and more wild in their too-small apartment. She imagined Jae crossing the barricades, about to board the subway, moving toward them. Hours earlier, when she was reunited with her children, she had been delighted to see them. Pausing at the preschool gates, she watched them basking in the schoolyard, unaware of her watching them. Then there was the moment she loved the most—when they noticed her and let out squeals of delight before giddily jumping into her arms. She could not get used to being called someone’s mother, the way it erased her name, made her a stranger to herself. Yet in these moments of reunion when her younger son, Hoon-min, clung to her, she felt alive and powerful—a captain rescuing those from a sinking ship—a feeling that lasted only for a while before her nerves started to fray in the unspooling hours and she began eyeing the clock for their father’s return. The boys were hungry, but she wanted to wait for Jae. For weeks his work as an engineer at Aspiration Tower had been keeping him on-site at all hours. Tonight, he had promised to come home early so they could eat together, though by six-fifteen there was no sign of him. She was like an overfilled kettle, and Hoon-min’s whining was the flame threatening to boil her over. Having checked that the boys had not unplugged the phone from the wall again, Sae looked at her silent pager, feeling herself begin to rattle with fury. Shouting for the boys to sit at the table, she prepared rice and seaweed, shrugging off the guilt of offering them such a paltry meal. It’s not as though we do this every day, Jae would say. He knew exactly how to defuse her. She felt herself soften toward him, so she willed herself to stay angry. By seven o’clock, Sae had no choice but to surrender to Jae’s absence. She considered leaving him a message on his pager, but he would call soon, she thought, with an excuse about being tied up at the Tower. Taking command of the evening, she started a bath, instructing the boys to stop touching each other’s penises, to stop splashing water at her or in the other’s eyes. They ignored these instruction...

Product details

• Authors: Hannah Michell
• Publisher: Random House USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 11.07.2023
• EAN: 9780593596050
• ISBN: 978-0-593-59605-0
• No. of pages: 320
• Dimensions: 146 mm x 217 mm x 28 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature