“A beautifully curated neighborhood plant shop, sunlight falling on succulents, and a gentle, charming owner… It sounds like the perfect recipe for a healing novel. But in The Plant Shop, beneath this gentle surface lies a bloody core. This shop—and this novel—offer a far more savage, more brutal kind of healing.”
— Mary Marga Locke, The New York Times Book Review

“Kang Min-young is a writer who knows how to weave a world with the most precise sentences. In this novel, with her most trusted prose, she displays with great ambition and breadth the deep empathy between women, and how to protect those victims isolated and helpless in society.”
— Ahn Bo-yoon, renowned novelist

“In this tightly paced work, Kang Min-young‘s prose is both powerfully propulsive and remarkably plain. Through glimpses into the protagonist Yu-hee’s past, the entire novel, beneath its shell of thriller and revenge, is imbued with profound and deeply moving emotional depth.”
— Publishers Weekly

★ Rights sold to the UK, USA, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Brazil, Turkey, France, Thailand, Spain, Ukraine, and Romania.
★ A new work by the winner of the Jaum and Moim Novel Award: Kang Min-young made her official debut by winning the 2020 Jaum and Moim Novel Award. This book is her new full-length novel following I Hope You Don‘t Freeze and Run at Full Speed, continuing her sharp prose in writing about how trapped women break free from their predicaments.
★ A suspense narrative set on the stage of a “plant shop,” with suspense unfolding layer by layer, gripping and immersive.
★ A profound portrayal of women’s survival struggles and resistance: Using “plants” as a metaphor, this book writes about how women stubbornly survive and break free from violence and oppression.

Kang Min-young, who rose to prominence by winning the 2020 Jaum and Moim Novel Award, brings a suspenseful new full-length novel, The Plant Shop. As always, the author depicts with keen prose the anxious conditions of survival in our times, writing about how trapped women break free from their predicaments—and this work represents a new breakthrough in both scope and narrative scale.

There is a “plant shop” that has become a local Instagram hotspot thanks to its quiet, mysterious atmosphere. The owner, Choi Yu-hee, renovated an old house and runs this particularly special shop. Both the shop and its owner are exquisite and beautiful. But every night after the shop closes, Yu-hee picks up a hoe and shovel and walks quietly into the yard. Sometimes she buries something finely crushed into the soil; sometimes she buries large pieces of something that has been sawed apart…

Excerpts

P.14
“I have always believed that people and plants are the same. People, like plants, can be improved through pruning—with a little shaping, they can move in a more correct direction. I, too, have endured much pain, but I have always believed that human nature is not wholly evil. Yet at some point, that belief began to fade. It was mostly those men who had once crossed paths with Yu-hee…”

P.42
At that moment, Yu-hee suddenly realized. No—the one at fault was not me. Even if I set aside my prejudices and tried my utmost to treat others with sincerity, that should not be my fault. Yu-hee looked toward the hoe and shovel placed in the corner of the yard, marked with the traces of daily labor. She gazed for a long time at the pests and insects that had been crushed until they could no longer move…

P.107-108
Could the wounded Redov revive once more? The hellish days returned in less than a day, suffocating pressure gripping her body tightly. Min-ha shut her eyes tightly.

P.112
Even a damaged potted plant like this—even a me like this—can I come back to life again? Looking at the scarred plant, anger surged from deep within her heart.

Kang Min-young

She won the 2020 Jaum and Moim Novel Award, which launched her writing career.

Novellas: The Witness at Stop One
Novels: I Hope You Don‘t Freeze, Run at Full Speed, The Plant Shop, The Land of Farewell, Last Login
Essay collection: Ride a Bicycle and You’ll Move Forward

She also serves as editor-in-chief of the film magazine CAST.

Awards: 2020 Jaum and Moim Novel Award.