Whale: SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2023

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The Gospel According to the New World starts with the birth of a boy in an “overseas department”, “surrounded by water on all sides”. It is a book about appetite – in the most common sense of the word, since the narrator is a passionate cook – but also about the appetite for another’s body, for life and for freedom. In a totalitarian state, Kwan would have been reviled as an enemy of the people and thrown into jail as many of his characters tend to find themselves in Part Three in the novel. At the heart of the story is Edgar Wilson, stun operator, who is troubled by the look in the eyes of the cows he kills: “Inside them is only darkness, and it cannot be trespassed. It’s set in a Brazilian slaughterhouse run by Senhor Milo; next door is the shiny new hamburger factory that receives its wares – “all that white reflects a peace that doesn’t exist”.

A fast-paced, poignant and funny take on Franco-African history and its complexities and problems interlaced with wry and surprising takes on current consumer culture, largely told through the lives of migrant workers employed to ‘stand heavy’ as retail security guards, who are often overlooked and yet themselves see everything. The central figure is Gaustine, a sort of time traveller who opens a clinic devoted to periods of the past, to help people with Alzheimer’s. Geumbok, the protagonist, is an irrepressible entrepreneur and individualist, but with contradictions – she is sly and gullible, loving and violent, dedicated and treacherous. Whale provides an unflinching look at two contrasting portraits of national identity in the era of Korean modernisation – equally valid, yet highly oppositional.

If you had to choose three works of fiction that have inspired your career the most, what would they be and why? Is it a fable, a folktale, a fantasy or even a statement on how women are treated by society in general? With the sharpness of an Ivorian coupé-décalé song, GauZ’ offers evocative glimpses into the life of African migrants in France, from the first generation who could set up their own businesses to the later wave, most of whom have been denied legal immigrant status. Standing Heavy offers a refreshing and often caustic take on the cultural and economic consequences of an encounter between western consumerism and capitalism and the acute African sense of observation and derision. Cocooned by the morning fog, the town faintly revealed its shape, like a once-prosperous ancient city fallen into ruin.

Told in an omniscient and playful narrative voice, smoothly translated by Chi-Young Kim, this is a distinctly Korean take onGreat Expectations, a tale of aspiration and folly punctuated with artisanal bricks and dried fish .It is a philosophical exploration about memory and nostalgia, about forgetting and trying to hold on to our pasts while making sense of our present and future.