Please Look After Mom
by Kyung-Sook Shin
A Korean mother goes missing. Her family realizes they never knew her.
For you if
you've taken someone for granted and are starting to understand what that cost
⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡
Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.
Buy New on Bookshop.orgSupports independent bookstores
— OR —
Find Used on Better World BooksSecondhand & sustainable
$18 MSRP
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.
A 69-year-old Korean woman gets separated from her husband at Seoul Station and disappears. Her adult children search for her and in doing so realize how little they knew her — the woman behind the mother, the life she had before and beneath her role in their family. Shin writes in second person — you lost your mother — which places the reader inside the guilt immediately. The most widely read Korean novel internationally and the one that captures something universal about what children fail to see in their parents until it is too late.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- South Korea • East Asia
- Voice
- Written by a South Korean author
- Themes
- familymotherhood
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
To the End of the Land
David Grossman
A mother walks Israel to avoid the news of her son.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Beloved
Toni Morrison
A ghost. A mother. The thing she did out of love.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
A Golden Age
Tahmima Anam
Dhaka, 1971. A mother hides freedom fighters in her garden.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Cloudstreet
Tim Winton
Two families. One house in Perth. Twenty years of ordinary life.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Flip the lens
Same country. Now hear it from the other side.
For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
And Tango Makes Three
Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
Two penguin dads hatch an egg. True story. Banned.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Absolutely Normal Chaos
Sharon Creech
A summer journal. A strange cousin. The Odyssey. Everything connects.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963
Christopher Paul Curtis
A funny family road trip to Birmingham. Then 1963 arrives.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST