Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop

It's a cozy anti-capitalist tale that reads like a gauzy K-drama. Yeong-ju leaves the unrelenting grind of her engineering job, divorces her career obsessed husband, and decides to open up a bookshop in a quiet Seoul neighbourhood. She discovers a found family that is likewise escaping from the prevailing hyper-competitive, burnout inducing reality that is modern life.

Jungsuh left the corporate world behind to pursue knitting, Mincheol escaped the hagwon to spend his afternoons at the bookshop, and Minjun has thwarted his parents expectations by devoting his time to being the bookshop barista. All of them are renegotiating their lives and looking for new meaning at a different pace than what the world might expect of them.

It's an earnest, heart-on-its-sleeve story that mirrors the authors own experience leaving her career as a software engineer at LG to pursue writing, eventually winning a story contest, and publishing it as an ebook to nationwide acclaim. So maybe fairy-tales do come true.