Yu-jin is a good son, a model student and a successful athlete. But one day he wakes up covered in blood. There's no sign of a break-in and there's a body downstairs. It's the body of someone who Yu-jin knows all too well. Yu-jin struggles to piece together the fragments of what he can remember from the night before.
He suffers from regular seizures and blackouts. He knows he will be accused if he reports the body, but what to do instead? Faced with an unthinkable choice, Yu-jin makes an unthinkable decision. Through investigating the murder, reading diaries, and looking at his own past and childhood, Yu-jin discovers what has happened. The police descend on the suburban South Korean district in which he lives. The body of a young woman is discovered. Yu-jin has to go back, right back, to remember what happened, back to the night he lost his father and brother, and even further than that. The Good Son deals with the ultimate taboo in family life, and asks the question: how far will you go to protect your children from themselves?
Barb takes care of the web orders here at Boffins, and is your contact for book club enquiries. She spends all her spare time curled up on the couch reading and for the last several years has reviewed books on the Afternoon Program on ABC radio Perth.
A young university student wakes one morning covered in blood and discovers a body downstairs in his apartment. Yu-jin has little memory of the previous night’s events, but can not believe he could have committed a murder so sets about investigating what happened. Over the following 48 hours as he cleans up the apartment and is visited by his brother, aunt and the police, Yu-jin begins to piece together a puzzle that in fact goes back more than a decade, to a family holiday when two other deaths occurred.
You-jeong Jeong is a well know Korean author, but this is the first time one of her books has been translated into English. A psychological thriller, its first person narrative is seriously creepy. We sense Yu-jin is a bit odd, and are told he is on meds for epilepsy. Blackouts and seizures are a part of life he just has to deal with, but they make remembering events all the more difficult. The slow reveal of what happened and why in the recent and distant past is cannily handled by Jeong and makes this a compulsive read.
