HOUSE OF THE WINDS
UK Edition:
Publication Date: July 2002
256 pages Reissue edition
ISBN: 1 84024 212 4
£7.99
Paperback Edition:
Penguin USA
Publication Date: August 1, 2000
240 pages Reissue edition
ISBN: 0140291946
$12.95
Hardcover Edition:
Interlink Publishing Group
Publication date: October 1, 1998
5 1/4" x 8" - 232 pages
ISBN 1-56656-305-4
hardback $22.95 (in Canada, $32.95)
Korean Translation:
Seoul, Korea
Publication Date: May 2001
You see the simple
afternoon light that long ago shone on your mother’s hand and give it a
ghostly soul. Here and there, you stumble onto secrets although they
were not secrets at the time...
About the book:
HOUSE OF THE WINDS, set in the 60s and 70s of Korea, is a portrait of a Korean family and especially its women whose lives have been deeply affected by its tumultuous history: the thirty-six years of Japanese rule and the Korean War. The narrator is a girl, the youngest of three children, who observes the world around her with a keen understanding of and deep sympathy toward her family of sad women. It is a world full of historical, mythical and ghostly implications where voiceless women roam.
The narrator is our guide through a world in which even birds cry instead of sing (“Everything cried and cried beautifully in Korea”). An American electric iron is so powerful it sets off a coup d’etat. Grandfather dies with a crab-apple in his mouth.
Mia Yun invites her readers into the “folds of history” where Korean women, the descendants of the she-bear woman and the son of the king of heaven, live... “laughing, wailing, spirit-cajoling, poetry-writing, tear-hiding, bosom-bracing, scheming, fire-breathing.”
Excerpts from House of the Winds
