I reviewed the haunting novel To the Warm Horizon for World Literature Today.

Here’s an excerpt from the review:

This pandemic year has felt like a dystopia to many of us—we were told to stay away from family and friends, urged to remain inside our homes, encouraged to stock up on food. Yet, as businesses and schools start opening back up, we continue to be vigilant, never knowing if what happened in March 2020 could happen again. Still, humanity is picking itself up again and looking toward the future, like we always do. Thus I could say that reading To the Warm Horizon—a postapocalyptic tale about a deadly virus and its violent aftermath—might make one feel better about the year we’ve just endured, since (thankfully) nothing like what Choi Jin-young describes has happened. On the other hand, reading about a group of Koreans moving across Russia, stealing whatever food they can, and fighting off similarly desperate wanderers with knives and guns might bring back our worst fears from 2020. Let me add one disturbing fact: this novel was first published in Korean in 2017.

Read the entire review here.