My Father’s Liberation

So, Father died. Slammed his head into a telephone pole. A very serious man had seriously come to the end of a seriously lived life by seriously slamming his head against a telephone pole.

Following her father’s sudden death, university lecturer Ahry returns to her rural hometown of Gurye to hold his funeral. As a child, she avidly listened to her father's stories about guerrilla warfare. But the older she got, the more ridiculous his revolutionary mindset seemed. A former communist partisan who fought in the Korean War, Sangwook remained a devout socialist in capitalist South Korea. Never wavering in his wish for an equal world, he lived by the rigid principle of “Serve the People,” a belief that only brought trouble to their doorstep. To Ahry, her father was a failed revolutionary who never got over his youthful dreams.

But as she discovers, Sangwook did serve the people—and. changed lives—in his own unique way. A colorful cast of characters gather at the funeral home to pay their respects, including Ahry's alcoholic and resentful uncle, her father's childhood best friend who holds very different political views, the children of former compatriots, a teenage dropout turned cigarette buddy, and the other Sangwook, a policeman her father saved from certain disaster. And as friends and comrades recount her father’s life—his glory days as a partisan, his fake treachery to protect his people, his tangled relationship with his family—Ahry realizes she has much to learn about her unforgettable father.

An unlikely bestseller ten years in the making, Jeong Ji-a's semi-autobiographical novel illuminates a part of Korea's overlooked history and its unsung partisan fighters. Translated by the award-winning Anton Hur, My Father’s Liberation is a witty and poignant tale of a passionate man and the impact of his decisions on his country, his family, and history itself.

Translated from the Korean by Anton Hur