Gu Byeong-mo
about
The French editions of Gu Byeong-mo’s Greatest Fish (Fils de l’eau) and The Wizard Bakery (Les Petits Pains de la pleine lune) were published by Philippe Picquier. The Wizard Bakery was also published in Taiwan and Mexico, and became a bestseller in Mexico. Gu has won the Changbi Prize for Young Adult Fiction, the Today’s Writer Award, and the Hwang Sun-Won Rising Writer Awards
books
Bruised Fruit (The Old Woman with the Knife)
Wisdomhouse/Korea , 2013 (344 pages)
Sold to Decrenzco/France
Translation by Chi young Kim
Movie/TV rights optioned by Skydance Productions. Will be published by Hanover Square Press/North America, Canongate/UK & Commonwealth, Ullstein/Germany, Mondadori/Italy
This is a story about a women killer in her 60s. She has been a cold-hearted killer for more than 40 years but going through the process of aging, she finds things that she wants to protect although she had spent her life trying not to protect anything. Female serial killer. A meditation on aging told through an action packed surreal thriller.
Wizard Bakery
2008.Wisdom House Young Adult,/Crossover Debut novel
published in Mexico by Mirador/ bestseller,Philippe Picquier/France
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds2ar3Ydd2g
https://library.ltikorea.or.kr/node/23011
A boy falsely accused of a wrongdoing runs away from home and walks into a bakery that turns out to be a portal into a magical world. The novel "Wizard Bakery" made waves in Mexican The novel, translated as "La Panaderia Encantada" in Spanish, was published last December by Nostra Ediciones, a local publisher that specializes in children's books and young adult literature. An unprecedented 10,000 copies of the first edition were sold. After a short trailer for the novel published on YouTube caught the attention of Mexican teenagers, reviews and recommendations for the novel went viral across social media. The novel has since gained quite a following among young adult readers in Mexico.
The Boy with Gills
2011, Wisdomhouse /Korea, Philiipe Picquier/France 2012 210pp.
Driven to the edge as a result of a series of tragic events, a man jumps into a lake with his young son in his arms. The man loses his life, but the child survives. Near the exact moment that would have been his death, the child’s instinct to breathe results in the emergence of gills behind his ears. An old man who lives near the lake rescues the child and then gives him the name Gon. There are no other people in Gon’s life except for the old man and his grandson, Gang-ha. Even though Gang-ha feels sympathy for Gon, he often hits him and orders him down to the lakebed to pick up all the coins that visitors throw into the lake. Gon grows into a man and rescues a woman named Hae-ryu, who after a misstep, falls into the water.
In Greatest Fish, Gu Byeong-mo introduces a character with gills. While her debut juvenile novel, The Wizard Bakery, combined fantasy and realism, in this new novel the author expounds on the poverty, violence, hatred, and imprecations that mark the characters by incorporating them into a character with gills, thereby successfully combining fantasy with the darker side of literature appropriate for adults. The novel begins with the prologue of Hae-ryu, who is drawn to the half-fish half-man that saved her, and alternates between her first-person narration and the third-person point of view of Gon who tells his coming of age story. But the plot takes an abrupt turn when Gang-ha’s mother, I-nyeong, shows up one day. She has come back as a drug addict, and the only person who treats her nicely is Gon. She gets killed when she is punctured in the neck by a nail as Gon tries to physically prevent her from committing suicide. Gon, who can no longer stay in Gang-ha’s house, leaves. The author seems to suggest that the only thing that enables us to breathe in a world that is uninhabitable, like being underwater, are the gills, and that we all have our own unique set of gills to cope with life.
