Shin Kyung-sook

Shin Kyung-sook’s novel “Please Take Care of Mom” has sold a landmark 2 million copies, her publisher Changbi announced Tuesday.

The 49-year-old’s popular book is about a family’s search for a missing mother. Translated into various languages around the world including English for the United States, it also won the Asian Man Booker Prize.

The publisher said that book sales reached the 2 million mark two years and seven months after marking 1 million sales.

Shin has said that her book shows through its search for the mother is a modern-day journey for people to recover what they’ve lost in the modernization process.

After making her literary debut in 1985 with the novella “Winter’s Fable,” the author continued her success with “Where the Organs Lay”, ”Deep Sorrow” and “A Lone Room.”

The last Korean novel to sell more than 2 million was in 2000 with author Cho Jeong-in’s “Gasigogi,” which means thornback in Korean. Changbi Publishing said that it will hold various events to mark the achievement including a public reading at of the book at Humanities Café Changbi in the Hongdae district in Seoul. <Korea Times>

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