A quietly menacing and profoundly moving exploration of generational trauma, global violence and ancestral memory set in the aftermath of the Korean war, by a virtuosic new voice in fiction.
Yewon dreams of a hotel. In the hotel, there are infinite keys to infinite rooms, and a quiet terror she is desperate to escape.
When Yewon wakes, she sees her life: a young woman, trapped in the tiny South Korean village of her birth, watching her mother wash the bones of their ancestors in their decrepit bathtub. Every house has them, these rotting and fragmented bones, reminders of what they have all lost to a war that never seems to end. Yewon was born in this bathtub of bones, and so were her siblings. Now, Yewon's father has recently died; Yewon's brother is stationed near the North Korean border; her sister has just undergone a life-changing tragedy; and her mother is constantly worried, her health declining. Yewon's best friend has gone off to Seoul to start a new life without her. Lost and alone, plagued by petrifying dreams of a ravaged, mysterious hotel, Yewon soon begins to see the truth of a country, a heritage, she is just beginning to understand.
A haunting, claustrophobic novel where the constant threat of violence is just beyond reach, The Invisible Hotel is a speculative tale of political and ideological adolescence. Yeji Y. Ham turns her lucid, cool yet compassionate focus to the human consequences of a war that has continued for over seven decades, the looming threat of nuclear attack by the North, and the pain this terror inflicts on everyday life in South Korea.
