FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF KOREAN CULT CLASSIC HUNGER
A harrowing and moving novel about our will to live and love until the very end.
We couldn't escape memory, too exhausted to imagine any future. That's exactly why I refused to resemble misfortune. I didn't want to despise life.
A mutant virus has swept half of the world's population overnight. The known world has collapsed. The new world is a lawless place where children's livers are believed to provide immunity.
Dori vows to protect her deaf and mute younger sister at all costs after losing their parents to the deadly pandemic. As they journey barefoot toward a land on a distant horizon, they encounter Jina, a young woman with blood-red hair who offers to take them aboard a caravan prepped for the end of the world--much to the disproval of her suspicious, dogged father. Along a road marred by desperate acts of violence and brutality, their paths intertwine with Ryu, a woman haunted by the death of her daughter and memories of a life oppressed by poverty.
Alienation, mistrust, and doubt mark every turn. Yet, despite the threat of death and the shadows cast by unspeakable grief, a sense of friendship begins to form, and even blossom into love, as each of the alternating perspectives reflect on the miraculous, everyday moments worth living for.
In spare, striking prose pulsing with suspense, Everything Happened at Once unfolds as a dystopian road novel and a tenderhearted literary portrait of five people seeking the endurance of humanity amidst disaster. Choi's intimate and astounding landscape of hope, love, and determination reveals the power of human connection as the ultimate key to survival.
"Complex, imperfect and utterly mesmerizing." --The Korea Times