Tailbone

A fierce and gorgeous debut novel about a teenager who runs away from her abusive home to live in a boarding house for single women as a global financial crash threatens the people of Seoul.

Set in Seoul in 2008, Tailbone follows the story of an unnamed teenage girl who,
after years of struggling with her alcoholic father’s abuse and what she sees as her
mother’s cowardice, decides to run away. At a boardinghouse for single women, the
narrator is pulled into the orbit of one of the other girls living there: an older girl
named Juju, whose beauty and grit offer anchorage in the narrator’s strange new
life.

But when a global financial crisis reaches South Korea, fears of a wider economic
collapse bring the city to a standstill. Everything the girls have come to rely on for
survival--mainly, the patronage of wealthy men--is put at risk. As businesses close
and winter sets in, the narrator is forced to reckon with her deepening fear for Juju’s
future, and also her own uncertain path. Will she stay on the run or go back home to
her heartbroken mother? In a city held captive to greed and desperation, what can
a helpless woman like Juju teach her about survival? Will their hope for each other
ignite courage or destruction?

A poignant tale about the impact of colonial and familial violence, class, privilege,
and womanhood, Tailbone is a powerful and thrilling novel from a blazing new
talent.