Concerning My Daughter

An admirably nuanced portrait of prejudice . . . one that boldly takes on the daunting task of humanizing someone whose prejudice has made her cruel.An acerbic and wise book.I can't help but be moved by a story about women meeting, fighting, helping each other, looking after one another, and raising their voices against the prejudice and criticism they are subject to.The self-questioning nature of Hye-jin’s narrator allows her to explore the tensions between mother and daughter with great deftness. The mother’s socially conservative values clash against her unwavering love for her daughter: how best to protect Green in a dangerous, changing world?Concerning My Daughter is one of the best character studies I've read in years - thoughtful, complicated and surprisingly kind, it raises important questions about ageing, family, and both the cost and the value of change.

Concerning My Daughter is a work that is unafraid of the human body in all its contradictions, at once philosophical and practical in its treatment of the aging body, the gendered body, the body’s capacity for acts of caretaking, protest, and love. Urgent, timely, tender.

Concerning My Daughter provides desperate narratives of its female characters. It’s the story of a mother and a daughter, but it goes beyond the relationship and is also ahead of our time. By accompanying the women’s journey overcoming pain and suffering in their lives, we will see our stereotypes broken in the end. The great power smashing our fixed old ideas! This book is filled with such energy.

Kim’s compassionate portrayal of the narrator’s contradictions and ever-changing feelings makes her project captivating and moving. Readers will be grateful to discover this new author.Told in a brutally honest voice that at times simmers with impotent rage, Kim Hye-jin’s Concerning My Daughter taps into the complexities of mother–daughter dynamics, but also the systemic issues and obstacles that LGBTQ communities face in heteronormative societies.

The Prize-Winning International Bestseller

'I can't help but be moved by a story about women meeting, fighting, helping each other, looking after one another, and raising their voices against the prejudice and criticism they are subject to.'
Cho Nam-joo, author of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

When a mother allows her thirty-something daughter to move into her apartment, she wants for her what many mothers might say they want for their child: a steady income, and, even better, a good husband with a good job with whom to start a family.

But when Green turns up with her girlfriend, Lane, in tow, her mother is unprepared and unwilling to welcome Lane into her home. In fact, she can barely bring herself to be civil. Having centred her life on her husband and child, her daughter’s definition of family is not one she can accept. Her daughter’s involvement in a case of unfair dismissal involving gay colleagues from the university where she works is similarly strange to her.

And yet when the care home where she works insists that she lower her standard of care for an elderly dementia patient who has no family, who travelled the world as a successful diplomat, who chose not to have children, Green’s mother cannot accept it. Why should not having chosen a traditional life mean that your life is worth nothing at all?

In Concerning My Daughter, translated from Korean by Jamie Chang, Kim Hye-jin lays bare our most universal fears on ageing, death, and isolation, to offer finally a paean to love in all its forms.

Kim Hye-jin was born in Daegu, Korea, in 1983. She debuted in 2012 when her story ‘Chicken Run’ won Dong-A Ilbo’s Spring Literary Award. She won the Joongang Novel Prize for Joongang Station, and the Shin Dong-yup Prize for Literature for Concerning My Daughter.