The Hole

The Hole

Hye-Young Pyun

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

A bestseller in Korea, a psychological thriller about loneliness and the dark truths we try to bury.In this tense, gripping novel by a rising star of Korean literature, Ogi has woken from a coma after causing a devastating car accident that took his wife’s life and left him paralyzed and badly disfigured. His caretaker is his mother-in-law, a widow grieving the loss of her only child. Ogi is neglected and left alone in his bed. His world shrinks to the room he lies in and his memories of his troubled relationship with his wife, a sensitive, intelligent woman who found all of her life goals thwarted except for one: cultivating the garden in front of their house. But soon Ogi notices his mother-in-law in the abandoned garden, uprooting what his wife had worked so hard to plant and obsessively digging larger and larger holes. When asked, she answers only that she is finishing what her daughter started.Evoking Herman Koch’s The Dinner and Stephen King’s Misery, award-winning author Hye-young Pyun’s The Hole is a superbly crafted and deeply unnerving novel about the horrors of isolation and neglect in all of its banal and brutal forms. As Ogi desperately searches for a way to escape, he discovers the difficult truth about his wife and the toll their life together took on her.


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  • cathricc
    Dec 25, 2024
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  • tanninsandtales
    Mar 09, 2025
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  • junefiles
    Mar 14, 2025
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    i read this book within 3 hours 36 minutes and going to say that the book is quite worth for quick reading. mysterious and phycological horror. some tenses weren't breaking down here like leaving the readers in hanging but it's still in the range of predictable if you get used to the similar genre of the hole. neat composes of the story yet spared the boredoms a lot in the narration. i was in limbo last night to continue the book or dnf it all the way, but finishing it give me more solaces.

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