The Good Son: A Novel

by You-Jeong Jeong

Overview

“Ingeniously twisted.” —Entertainment Weekly, “Must List”

“Will leave even the most seasoned crime fiction readers guessing.” —CrimeReads

"[Jeong] maintains suspense about her inhuman-seeming protagonist's fate until the bitter end.” —The Wall Street Journal

Finalist for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon’s “Summer Reads” Book Club

The Talented Mr. Ripley meets The Bad Seed in this breathless, chilling psychological thriller by the #1 bestselling novelist known as “Korea's Stephen King” 

Who can you trust if you can't trust yourself?
 
Early one morning, twenty-six-year-old Yu-jin wakes up to a strange metallic smell, and a phone call from his brother asking if everything's all right at home – he missed a call from their mother in the middle of the night. Yu-jin soon discovers her murdered body, lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs of their stylish Seoul duplex. He can't remember much about the night before; having suffered from seizures for most of his life, Yu-jin often has trouble with his memory. All he has is a faint impression of his mother calling his name. But was she calling for help? Or begging for her life?
 
Thus begins Yu-jin's frantic three-day search to uncover what happened that night, and to finally learn the truth about himself and his family. A shocking and addictive psychological thriller, The Good Son explores the mysteries of mind and memory, and the twisted relationship between a mother and son, with incredible urgency.

Named a Must-Read Book of the Summer by Elle, Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, Bustle, CrimeReads, Lit Hub, The Millions, Electric Literature, and Brit + Co

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143131953
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/05/2018
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	322,818
Product dimensions:	7.60(w) x 5.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

South Korea’s leading writer of psychological thrillers and crime fiction, You-Jeong Jeong is the award-winning author of four novels including Seven Years of Darkness, which was named one of the top ten crime novels of 2015 by Die Zeit (Germany). Her work has been translated into seven languages. A #1 bestseller in Korea, The Good Son is the first of her books to appear in English.
 
Chi-Young Kim is the award-winning translator of the Man Asian Literary Prize-winning and bestselling novel Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin, The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down by Haemin Sunim, and works of fiction by Sun-Mi Hwang, J.M. Lee, and Young-Ha Kim, among others. She lives in Los Angeles.

Read an Excerpt

The smell of blood woke me. It was intense, as though my whole body were inhaling it. It reverberated and expanded within me. Strange scenes flitted through my mind—the fuzzy yellow light of a row of street lamps in the fog, swirling water below my feet, a crimson umbrella rolling along a rain-soaked road, a plastic tarpaulin shrouding a construction site snapping in the wind. Somewhere a man was singing and slurring lyrics: a song about a girl he couldn’t forget, and about her walking in the rain.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Good Son"
by .
Copyright © 2018 You-Jeong Jeong.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

★ 04/02/2018
“The smell of blood woke me.” So says Han Yu-jin, a would-be law student with a history of seizures who lives in Incheon, at the start of South Korean author Jeong’s superlative thriller, her first to be translated into English. After he regains consciousness, Yu-jin follows an increasingly ominous trail of bloody handprints and footprints to the kitchen, where he finds his mother’s body. Her throat has been slit and her hands posed, clasped, on her chest. All Yu-jin can recall about the previous night is that he went out for a run around midnight in the rain to relieve his restlessness and saw a girl get off a bus. Did he kill his mother? His desperate efforts to sort out exactly what happened are intensified when his stepbrother and his aunt call to ask after his mother. Readers who enjoy grappling with the issue of a narrator’s reliability will relish Yu-jin, who believes that “being true to life wasn’t the only way to tell a story.” Agent: Barbara Zitwer, Barbara J. Zitwer Agency. (June)

Publishers Weekly

At long last, South Korea’s preeminent author of psychological thrillers has arrived Stateside. The Good Son . . . [is] a perfect introduction: an ingeniously twisted mother-son saga that keeps your heart pumping—and then breaks it.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“A chilling portrait of a psychopath, and a beautifully evocative tale of wealth and isolation in modern South Korean life. You-Jeong Jeong has been called the Stephen King of South Korea, although I’d prefer to compare her to Lionel Shriver, Dorothy B. Hughes, or Patricia Highsmith.” 
—Molly Odintz, Lit Hub

“Absorbing . . . An unlikely thriller that we continue to read—thanks to Ms. Jeong's controlled prose...with a sickened sort of fascination. It's a testament to the author's skill and seriousness of purpose that she maintains suspense about her inhuman-seeming protagonist's fate until the bitter end.” 
—The Wall Street Journal

“Want to read an under-the-radar psychological thriller? Feel smug about pocketing The Good Son.”
—Elle.com

“Hard to put down.”
—The Financial Times

“Jeong expertly inches up the tension in this crafty, creepy story.” 
—The Guardian

“Jeong’s thrillers are wildly popular in South Korea, and we’ll soon learn why . . . The gore is intense, but the psychological terror might never wash off.”
—Vulture

“Riveting.”
—Bustle

“Satisfyingly chilling.”
—The Los Angeles Review of Books

"[A] must-read psychological thriller." 
—Lenny Letter

“Award-winning translator Chi-Young Kim ensures that Jeong is introduced to Anglophone readers with chilling precision . . . Lauded as South Korea’s leading psychological crime-fiction writer, Jeong performs intricate plotting here in a tale that . . . enthrall[s].”
—Booklist

“A precise, meticulously plotted thriller . . . The tension comes from Jeong’s prose, which spares not a single word . . . [The Good Son] sucks you in with precision and holds your attention, leaving you with a satisfying resolution.”
—World Literature Today

“A slow-burn psychological thriller with plenty of twists and things to think about.” 
—BookRiot

“[This] psychological thriller . . . will completely keep you interested all summer long.”
—Brit + Co

“[A] psychological murder mystery [that] subverts the usual clichés of its genre.”
—Electric Literature

“A cool, crafty did-he-do-it thriller buoyed by a rising tide of madness. Provocative yet profound, humming with mood and menace, The Good Son will rivet readers of Jo Nesbo and Patricia Highsmith.”
—A. J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window

“A gripping, atmospheric, edge-of-your-seat thriller, The Good Son is moody and dark in the best way, with an unreliable narrator you won’t soon forget. I loved it.” 
—Flynn Berry, author of Under the Harrow

“This book will pull you in; as you devour it, you may find yourself chilled to the bone by its unflinching depiction of the evil coiled within us.” 
—Kyung-Sook Shin, author of Please Look After Mom

“[A] superlative thriller.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Jeong slowly winds readers up with taut, high-tension wire . . . A creepy, insidious, blood-drenched tale in which nothing is quite what it seems.”
—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2018-03-20
A young man desperately tries to fill in gaps in his memory when he realizes he may have brutally murdered his own mother.Twenty-five-year-old Yu-jin lives in a sparkling modern apartment with his mother, has an adopted brother with whom he's close, and he's waiting to hear if he's been accepted into law school. One morning, he wakes covered in blood, "clots of the stuff" hanging off his clothes. He follows the trail of gore to find his mother lying at the bottom of the stairs with her throat cut. He explores the house, hoping for more clues as to what happened, and is surprised to find his late father's straight razor covered in blood in his room. Could he have killed his own mother? It sure seems that way, even if he can't remember doing it, and the fact that he hasn't been taking his anti-seizure medication doesn't help. Yu-jin narrates, telling a compelling, disturbing tale as he tries to piece together the events that might have led to his mother's death. Yu-jin's mom may not have had his best interests at heart. She made his stop swimming competitively—the only thing he really loved—because she claimed to fear he'd have a seizure in the water, and she nags him incessantly, always insisting she know his whereabouts. After his brother and father died 16 years ago, she adopted Hae-jin and has favored him over Yu-jin since. Yu-jin even confesses to following young women around at night, noting that frightening them is an addiction that he must feed. When a woman's body washes up nearby, one can't help but suspect Yu-jin. He doesn't help his case by admitting that he lies often. Pressure steadily mounts as Yu-jin's world, and mind, unravels. Bestselling Korean author Jeong slowly winds readers up with taut, high-tension wire, slowly letting it play out as the police inevitably come calling and Yu-jin begins to uncover shocking secrets about himself, his mother, and his past.A creepy, insidious, blood-drenched tale in which nothing is quite what it seems.

Kirkus Reviews

Twenty-something Yu-jin is the type of character every talented narrator might wish to portray. He’s unreliable, sick, prone to fits of epilepsy, and possibly a murderer. Narrator Johnathan McClain capitalizes on the drama of Yu-jin, an unreliable narrator, using an emotionless voice that makes him seem capable of anything. Did he kill his mother? Yu-jin finds her at the bottom of the stairs and, befuddled by his epilepsy medicine, has no recollection of the night before. Narrator Elizabeth Liang gives us his mother's thoughts as recorded in her diary, using a rich voice that details various dilemmas. This pair of experienced narrators work together to create a psychological thriller that will hook listeners to the very end. M.R. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2018 - AudioFile

Twenty-something Yu-jin is the type of character every talented narrator might wish to portray. He’s unreliable, sick, prone to fits of epilepsy, and possibly a murderer. Narrator Johnathan McClain capitalizes on the drama of Yu-jin, an unreliable narrator, using an emotionless voice that makes him seem capable of anything. Did he kill his mother? Yu-jin finds her at the bottom of the stairs and, befuddled by his epilepsy medicine, has no recollection of the night before. Narrator Elizabeth Liang gives us his mother's thoughts as recorded in her diary, using a rich voice that details various dilemmas. This pair of experienced narrators work together to create a psychological thriller that will hook listeners to the very end. M.R. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2018 - AudioFile