Snow Hunters

April 29, 2013
Yoon’s slim, melancholy debut novel (after a previous celebrated story collection, Once the Shore) explores the somber life of Yohan, a North Korean soldier captured in the south during the Korean War. After the war, Yohan is given ocean passage to Brazil, where he becomes an apprentice to an aging Japanese tailor. Descriptions of Yohan’s efforts to learn Brazilian Portuguese and feel present in his new world are interspersed with sometimes-harrowing scenes from the war (where he and his one friend clung desperately to each other), the prison camp, and the Russian occupation of his native country. The small Brazilian port town’s rich and turbulent history of Japanese immigrants and wartime defectors drifts vaguely over Yohan (and the reader), with information given by only a handful of people whom Yohan comes to know, including the local church’s groundskeeper, Peixe, and two peripatetic children who traveled to Brazil on the same ship as Yohan. Yohan forms his closest bond with the girl, Bia, and watches her grow up. Year to year she enters and exits his life with the seasons. When Bia calls to Yohan in her unique way, readers sympathetic to the trauma of losing one’s past and the isolation of displacement will be stirred. Agent: Bill Clegg, WME Entertainment.

June 15, 2013
A North Korean soldier finds unexpected solace following his self-exile to Brazil in this slender, ethereal first novel from Yoon (Once the Shore: Stories, 2009), a recipient of a 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation. The book opens just after the end of the Korean War, as a former war captive named Yohan is offered safe passage to Brazil, a country as strange and vibrant as his own was violent and distant. Yohan's agreement brings him into a rare apprenticeship under Kiyoshi, an aged Japanese tailor who works with a dignity underpinned by selflessness. In large part, Yoon's novel is a meditation on the passage of time as much as it is on Yohan's monklike life as Yoon chronicles the slow transformation of Yohan from a refugee to a treasured and essential part of village life. "How completely time could abandon someone," Yoon writes. "How far it could leap." Since the novel's pace is so still and observant, ordinary moments take on a graceful quality that might have gone unnoticed in less skilled hands: the umbrella offered by a stranger during the rain; the unlikely bond of friendship between Yohan and a rough South Korean sailor; the wordless companionship between Yohan and his mentor. A minimalist, well-crafted story about an austere man predisposed to avoidance who ultimately needs the people who fill up his empty spaces.

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August 1, 2013
Yoon's debut novel (following his beautiful short story collection, Once the Shore, 2009) follows the experiences of Yohan, a North Korean prisoner of war, on his path toward creating a new life in spite of his tragic past. At the end of the Korean War, 25-year-old Yohan, having spent two years in a South Korean war camp, declines to return to his home country and immigrates to Brazil. He arrives in a coastal town where arrangements have been made for him to work as an apprentice to an elderly Japanese tailor. As the years pass, Yohan's life in Brazil is punctuated by harrowing memories from his time in the camp as well as experiences from his youth. While loss and loneliness imbue many of his reflections, Yohan finds solaceand hopein his new surroundings and relationships. Among his circle are a genial groundskeeper of the local church and two young vagrants who flit in and out of Yohan's life. Yohan's journey is one of loss, memory, and identity, and Yoon's delicate prose creates a haunting perspective.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

March 1, 2013

A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 emerging author whose debut collection, Once the Shore, won a Best Debut Fiction award from National Public Radio, Yoon should do splendidly with this story of a young North Korean named Yohan. At the end of the Korean War, Yohan manages to defect, ending up in a Brazilian port town. Four people make his life less lonely: the Japanese tailor for whom he works, the groundskeeper at the church, and two wild children named Santi and Bia. Interesting that North Korea is surfacing in fiction (see, e.g., Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son), and great to see a new work by Yoon.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2013

After surviving the Korean War, Yohan spends another year in a prisoner-of-war camp south of the new border that splits the country in two. Rather than return north, where no one awaits him, Yohan begins life anew in a faraway coastal Brazilian village as a Japanese tailor's apprentice. As the years pass, "He wondered what choice there was in what was remembered; and what was forgotten." Yohan soon realizes that his life both before and after the war has been defined by quiet relationships--first with his widowed father and a childhood friend, then with the tailor Kiyoshi, the church groundskeeper, and two parentless children: "that in their silences there had been a form of love." Having already lost family, friends, language, and country, Yohan slowly sheds his solitude when gentle Kiyoshi dies and opens up to the possibility of attachment and love. VERDICT Yoon's debut novel began as a 500-page draft pared down to about 200 pages that reveal the same shimmering, evocative spareness of his 2009 collection, Once the Shore. The result is that rare, precious gem, with every remaining word to be cherished for the many discarded to achieve perfection. One of this year's best reads. [See Prepub Alert, 2/11/13.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2013

After surviving the Korean War, Yohan spends another year in a prisoner-of-war camp south of the new border that splits the country in two. Rather than return north, where no one awaits him, Yohan begins life anew in a faraway coastal Brazilian village as a Japanese tailor's apprentice. As the years pass, "He wondered what choice there was in what was remembered; and what was forgotten." Yohan soon realizes that his life both before and after the war has been defined by quiet relationships--first with his widowed father and a childhood friend, then with the tailor Kiyoshi, the church groundskeeper, and two parentless children: "that in their silences there had been a form of love." Having already lost family, friends, language, and country, Yohan slowly sheds his solitude when gentle Kiyoshi dies and opens up to the possibility of attachment and love. VERDICT Yoon's debut novel began as a 500-page draft pared down to about 200 pages that reveal the same shimmering, evocative spareness of his 2009 collection, Once the Shore. The result is that rare, precious gem, with every remaining word to be cherished for the many discarded to achieve perfection. One of this year's best reads. [See Prepub Alert, 2/11/13.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.