You-jeong Jeong - The Good Son

I closed the browser. While I’d been roaming the seas, the shock had worn off, and by now everyone had forgotten about the missing brother. I was about to turn off the computer when I decided to log into Hae-jin’s email. It wasn’t hard to remember his password. There were hundreds of unread messages, most of them promotional offers. I flipped back twenty pages or so before I found the email that had been sent around this time last year, confirming the purchase of an e-ticket to Rio.

Passenger name: KIM HAE-JIN

Booking reference: 1967-3589

Ticket number: 1809703202793

He had never opened the email. He wouldn’t have had the time before he left the flat. And he wasn’t able to open it afterwards. If I could have said my goodbyes the way I had planned, I wouldn’t be opening it now either. The Christmas present he never received had been embedded deep in my consciousness over the last year. Many nights, as I floated out in the ocean, I thought of our final wishes. If he’d let me go that day, what would have happened? Would he have been in Rio for Christmas? But he hadn’t let me go, and because of that, only my wish came true. Granted, it was a shrimp boat, not a yacht, and I’d worked myself nearly to death every day. Still, I had found peace. For the past year, I’d lived like an animal, without a thought. Now I’d returned to the world, but I wasn’t so sure I could live as a human, among other people.

I closed the browser and left the café. I walked around, looking for somewhere to sleep. The streets were deserted, the night was still and the sea air was wet with fog. Up ahead, in the mist, someone was walking. I heard her footsteps. The smell of blood wafted towards me with the salty wind.

You-jeong Jeong was born in Hampyeong, South Korea. You-jeong initially trained as a nurse and is now South Korea’s leading writer of psychological crime and thriller fiction. She is often compared to Stephen King and Raymond Chandler. You-jeong is the author of four novels including Seven Years of Darkness , which was named one of the top ten crime novels of 2015 by the German newspaper Die Zeit . Her work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Thai and Vietnamese. The Good Son is the first of her books to be translated into English.

Chi-Young Kim is the translator of the New York Times bestseller Please Look After Mother by Kyung-sook Shin, as well as fiction by Sun-mi Hwang, J.M. Lee and Young-ha Kim, among many others. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

LITTLE, BROWN

First published in South Korea in 2016 as Jongui Giwon by EunHaeng NaMu Publishing Co.

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Little, Brown

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Copyright © You-jeong Jeong 2016

Translation copyright © Chi-Young Kim 2018

Song on p. 3, p. 121 and p. 156 from ‘Woman in the Mist’ by Shin Juang-Hyeon

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4087-1123-1

Export ISBN: 978-1-4087-0974-0

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