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Excavations
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Sue Jean Kim, Intae Kim
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
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Summary
A former journalist turned stay-at-home mother must find her missing husband and protect her children in Excavations, a “sharp, impressive debut about corruption among South Korea’s elite” (The Boston Globe).
A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AND CRIMEREADS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Sae is waiting with two clingy toddlers for her husband to come home from work when she learns of a horrific disaster, the collapse of a massive skyscraper where Jae is an engineer. Minutes, then hours, and then days pass. Speculations of North Korean terrorism and structural instability circulate as possible causes of the Tower’s collapse. No one has seen Jae, but things aren’t adding up. Jae had told Sae he was working on a swimming pool on the top floor, but reports showed he was in the basement, on a different project. The government was involved, but the contractors were missing. Sae—who met Jae when they were students at an anti-government protest and has relied on him as her guiding and steadying hand—is troubled and suspicious.
Leaving the children with her estranged mother, Sae sets out to uncover the truth of what happened to her husband. Her investigation takes her to an upscale club where the proprietor, Myonghee, is not merely supplying booze and girls but also seeking information, for her own purposes, from every drunken businessman who lets corporate secrets slip. As Sae begins to find what she sought, she must ask herself: How well can you truly know the one you love and how is truth shaped by power?
Critic reviews
“[A] gripping story of love and disaster.”—Nylon
“Excavations is not only set in Seoul, but imbued with the city’s history and spirit. . . . Though at its center Excavations is a mystery novel, it weaves together large-scale allegories of capitalism and economic ambition with the smaller-scale drama of a single family in crisis, embedding layers of meaning into a page-turner.”—KQED
“An ambitious thriller that is just as engrossing for the whodunnit as is it for the historical milieu . . . With novels like Excavations, the past will not be easily forgotten—as it shouldn’t.”—Asian Review of Books