Around that time, she had the idea for a short story about a woman who becomes a plant, and who is lovingly tended by her husband. Her first novel, “Black Year,” a mystery about a missing woman, was released in 1998. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University, and published her first poems in 1993. “I was thinking about the spectrum of human behavior, from sublimity to horror, and wondered, is it really possible for humans to live a perfectly innocent life in this violent world, and what would happen if someone tried to achieve that?” she said. Her fascination with those contradictory impulses drives much of her fiction, and gave her the idea for “The Vegetarian.” Though she didn’t witness it directly, the crackdown profoundly shaped her views of humanity’s capacity for violence, but also for compassion and redemption. When she was 9 her family moved to Seoul, just four months before the Gwangju uprising in 1980, when government troops attacked pro-democracy protesters, firing on the crowds and killing hundreds. Just a few prominent contemporary South Korean novelists have been published in the United States, including Young-ha Kim and Kyung-sook Shin. While American publishers have become more willing to take risks on works in translation, particularly since the commercial success of international authors like Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Haruki Murakami, literary imports from South Korea remain scarce. Han gains a broad American readership, she will be one of the first South Korean authors to do so. “The technical achievement is astonishing and all the more so because she never allows you even a glimpse at the seams.” “The tension between the two creates a very singular effect within the reader a sense of complete immersion and utter disorientation all at once,” Ms. McBride, the author of “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing,” said she was struck by “the alignment of extraordinarily lyrical prose with incredibly brutal content.” Like a cursed madwoman in classical myth, Yeong-hye seems both eerily prophetic and increasingly unhinged when she begins starving herself, hoping to transform into a tree. Her abusive husband views her vegetarianism as an act of rebellion, while her brother-in-law becomes obsessed with her increasingly emaciated figure and her bluish birthmark, and lures her into performing in his sexually explicit video art. The story centers on Yeong-hye, a melancholy housewife who is haunted by violent dreams that drive her to stop eating meat. “We’ll see if that virus spreads into the reading public.” “Enthusiasm spread like a virus in the way that you always hope will happen,” Molly Stern, the publisher of Hogarth, said.

Deborah smith the vegetarian