WINNER OF THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 'A
strange painfully tender exploration of the brutality of desire indulged and the fatality of
desire ignored... Exquisite.' Eimear McBride Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people -
dutiful wife and mild-mannered office worker. One day prompted by grotesque recurring
nightmares Yeong-hye decides to become a vegetarian. But in South Korea where vegetarianism
is almost unheard-of and societal mores are strictly obeyed it is a shocking act of
subversion. Yeong-hye's passive rebellion rapidly manifests in ever more bizarre and
frightening forms from sexual sadism to attempted suicide and in increasingly erotic and
unhinged artworks as all the while she spirals further into her fantasies... Disturbing and
beautiful by turns The Vegetarian is a revelatory novel about modern day South Korea a tale
of shame desire and our faltering attempts to understand others.
