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This Burns My Heart

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This Burns My Heart
A Novel  
By Samuel Park
This edition: Hardcover, 320 pages
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Description

Chamara is difficult to translate from Korean to English: To stand it, to bear it, to grit your teeth and not cry out? To hold on, to wait until the worst is over? Such is the burden Samuel Park’s audacious, beautiful, and strong heroine, Soo-Ja Choi, faces in This Burns My Heart, an epic love story set in the intriguing landscape of postwar South Korea. On the eve of marriage to her weak, timid fiancé, Soo-Ja falls in love with a young medical student. But out of duty to her family and her culture she turns him away, choosing instead a world that leaves her trapped by suffocating customs.

In a country torn between past and present, Soo-Ja struggles to find happiness in a loveless marriage and to carve out a successful future for her only daughter. Forced by tradition to move in with her in-laws, she must navigate the dangers of a cruel household and pay the price of choosing the wrong husband. Meanwhile, the man she truly loves remains a lurking shadow in her life, reminding her constantly of the love she could have had.

Will Soo-Ja find a way to reunite with her one true love or be forced to live out her days wondering “what if ” and begin to fully understand the meaning of chamara?

He is not just telling her to stand the pain, but giving her comfort, the power to do so. Chamara is an incantation, and if she listens to its sound, she believes that she can do it, that she will push through this sadness. And if she is strong about it, she’ll be rewarded in the end. It is a way of saying, I know, I feel it, too. This burns my heart, too.
“An incredible read . . . I don’t want it to end. I love it!” 
-- Hoda Kotb, Today
“Extraordinary . . . A page-turner of a book . . . South Korea provides not only the backdrop of Soo-Ja’s story, but also the context for Park’s novel, which spans the decades after the Korean War to the beginning of the country’s economic boom. In a sense, Soo-Ja’s story parallels South Korea’s development from a poor, struggling state to a gleaming Asian tiger.”
-- Chicago Tribune
“Memorable . . . Atmospheric and exuberantly filmic . . . a simple but visceral romance in a refreshing Korean setting.”
-- The Miami Herald
“Park does a good job of bringing the rapidly changing South Korea of the 1960s alive. As cities sprout from beanfields and rickshaws give way to Kias, the world around Soo-Ja and her family is changing at a frightening speed. . . . I especially recommend this novel to readers who were intrigued (as was I) by Lisa See’s Dreams of Joy, set in postwar China. The contrast is fascinating.”
-- The Christian Science Monitor
“This Burns My Heart is quietly stunning--a soft, fierce story that lingers in the mind. Samuel Park is a deft and elegant writer; this is a very exciting debut.”
-- Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife
“Vivid…atmospheric . . . Park’s descriptions of antigovernment clashes and the martyrdom of a 12-year-old boy, in particular, provide eerily prescient reverberations of recent clashes in Syria.”
-- Boston Globe
“Writing prose with the beauty of poetry, Samuel Park traces a young woman's journey to hard-won maturity, alongside the meteoric rise of post-war Korea, in a novel which shines with eloquence and wisdom.”
-- David Henry Hwang, Tony-Award winning author of M. Butterfly
“This Burns My Heart is a delicate yet powerful story of love, loss, and endurance. The emotional world of the heroine, Soo-Ja, is beautifully realized; I found myself caught up in her dramas from start to finish.”
-- Sarah Waters, author of The Little Stranger and Fingersmith
“Park does a good job of bringing the rapidly changing South Korea of the 1960s alive. As cities sprout from beanfields and rickshaws give way to Kias, the world around Soo-Ja and her family is changing at a frightening speed. . . . I especially recommend this novel to readers who were intrigued (as was I) by Lisa See’s Dreams of Joy, set in postwar China. The contrast is fascinating.”
-- The Christian Science Monitor
“An understatedly brilliant tale . . . Through Soo-Ja’s eyes, Park beautifully evokes 1960s war-torn South Korea.”
-- Audrey Magazine
"This Burns My Heart is at once a passionate and sensitive love story and a fascinating historical novel set against the cultural dislocations of a rising South Korea. In his heroine Soo-Ja, Samuel Park has created an emotionally resonant character that readers will root for and long remember."
-- John Burnham Schwartz, bestselling author of The Commoner and Reservation Road
"Both an epic love story and an intimate depiction of life in post-war Korea, This Burns My Heart introduces a singular heroine whose passions, struggles, and triumphs are mirrored in our own. Samuel Park is one of those rare writers whose talent transcends the limits of race and gender."
-- Wendy Lee, author of Happy Family
"This Burns My Heart captured me with a heroine who is both irresistible and flawed, and engrossed me with increasing twists in a triangle of love and sacrifice. The story explores how a fateful choice colors a decade of marriage, and challenges a young woman's ambition already constrained by traditional Korean culture. Sam Park paints all the flavors of post-war Korea in this vivid debut, and his understanding and expression of the human heart is universal."
-- Eugenia Kim, author of The Calligrapher's Daughter
"The very talented Samuel Park weaves a compelling, vivid story of one family's evolution that deftly mirrors Korea's development from ancient country to modern society."
-- Janice Y.K. Lee, New York Times bestselling author of The Piano Teacher
Hitting the Shelves, 7/10/11
Denver Post, July 10, 2011
...three Americans as they each set off to explore the city with a French tutor. From the publisher This Burns My Heart by Samuel Park An unflappable heroine anchors Park's epic post- Korean War love story. Publishers weekly ...
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