Readers who have ever straddled multiple countries and/or cultures, readers who have endured and adjusted to peripatetic relocations, will find deep, aching resonance with Jinwoo Park's enthralling debut, Oxford Soju Club. Park, a Korean Canadian with a University of Oxford graduate degree who lives in Montreal, spotlights diaspora, heritage, family, self-knowledge--all commingled into a lightning-paced spy thriller with substantial body count.
Park's cast converges in Oxford, England, each sharing ethnic Korean heritage. That the main players are all initially introduced with descriptions rather than names suggests identities are mutable, especially amid political and historical (dis)loyalties. The Northerners are two: legendary North Korean spymaster Doha Kim and his protégé Yohan Kim--the former is also an Oxford professor while the latter is locally known as Junichi Nakamura, a French-born Oxford student from Nantes. The Southerner is Jihoon Lim, an immigrant from Seoul, now the proprietor of Soju Club, Oxford's only Korean restaurant with a single hard-working employee, Deoksu, who can make "perfect" kimchi almost as well as Jihoon's late mother. The American is Yunah Choi, born on Long Island, N.Y., to Korean immigrant, bagel store-owning parents; she's a CIA agent assigned to break up a North Korean cell, but in Oxford, she's South Korean med school dropout Seonhye Park, now bartending at a local pub.
Park immediately commands attention with a bloody opening: Doha's white shirt is soaked crimson with a fatal knife wound. Yohan's frantic attempts to save him are met with "Don't bother... I don't have long. So listen carefully now." Doha's cryptic final instructions are "Soju Club, Dr. Ryu"; his last entreaty is "Love. Yohan-a. Live." But Yohan can't go on without uncovering what happened, and why--his need to know provokes fatal crossed paths with shocking, wrenching consequences.
"Each character represents the different masks I have worn as a Korean immigrant--the one who tries to assimilate, the one who tries to be the model minority, and the one who rejects all of the above and tries to be Korean," Park writes in an opening note. "None of them turned out to be the path to finding my true self, so I wrote this book to seek the answer." Park moves fluidly, effortlessly between Oxford in the present and all the various pasts that had to happen to produce this intricate, lethal convergence. He expertly connects and comforts, severs and shocks, all the while navigating revelatory twists and turns. Pair with Alice Stephens's Famous Adopted People for an immersive diversion. --Terry Hong
Shelf Talker: Canadian Korean Jinwoo Park's debut novel, Oxford Soju Club, is an extraordinarily multilayered examination of identity and loyalty, deftly presented as an addicting spy thriller.