I’m shedding the skin of 2025, a year filled with catastrophic wars, human suffering and the rise of the idiot class. May 2026 bring its opposite — a year of peace, human dignity, and the rise of the enlightened. Wishing you and yours love, joy and kindness.
I wish you and yours a very happy holiday season! Thank you for a beautiful year and all the love and support you’ve given to me and White Chrysanthemum. It has been an amazing journey since publication day in January. I can’t wait for 2019 and the adventures ahead!
The Turkish translation for White Chrysanthemum is out just before the start of the new year! Thank you to my publishers, Arkadya. (Translated by Dilek Parsadan)
Can you spot my book? Hint, it’s on the top shelf. Dreams do come true! At my local @waterstones in the O2 Centre.
On another note, Happy Halloween!!!! 👻🎃
Here’s the US paperback release of White Chrysanthemum. Hopefully this beautiful new cover will reach many more people across America. There are so few Korean ‘comfort women’ still alive today–eight women died this year. I still meet so many people who have never heard of them, what they endured, or how many perished during WWII. History is written by the victors, yet women’s history is largely ignored. It’s time to remember, to tell women’s stories, so they will be ingrained in our collective memory. White Chrysanthemum tells one story, a historically ‘shameful’ one, hidden for decades, until a woman finally comes forward to tell her loved ones what happened to a sister long forgotten.
Translated into German, White Chrysanthemum becomes And Above Me The Sea. I love the cover, the poetic title and the timing. It’s the day after the autumnal equinox and the days grow darker from here. I hope German readers fall in love with Hana and Emi. I hope the story of the ‘comfort women’ translates across language and border and personal experience. I hope so much for this novel. ❤️
The UK 🇬🇧 paperback for White Chrysanthemum is out today! This year has been an amazing journey and I’m extremely thankful to everyone who made this book happen. Thank you for believing in this novel, for falling in love with Hana and Emi, and for sharing the story of the Korean ‘comfort women’ with the world. Writing this book has changed my life. Thank you to everyone who has read it and sent me messages of support. I will never forget what happened to the ‘comfort women’. They remain always in my thoughts and hopefully in yours. We live on when we are remembered by those who follow, whether or not our lives are written into history. #neverforget
I spent the day immersed in Lee Bul’s surreal world of futuristic and sometimes brutal art on exhibit at the Hayward Gallery London. She creates obscene beauty and entire worlds with everyday materials. My favourite display was her porcelain sculptures of robot parts, which fuses old Korea’s traditional celadon pottery with steampunk fiction. They could very well be unearthed relics from some future civilisation, dug up and glued back together by archaeologists of tomorrow. The exhibition ends 19 August so make it down there before it ends! It’s well worth the visit. Link
Here it is again, the Italian book trailer for Figlie del Mare, available now in Italy from Longanesi:
Mary Lynn Bracht 