Cirrus@Austlit

'Daisy & Woolf is a novel that will inevitably elicit comparisons to Michael Cunningham's The Hours for its fictional engagement with Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. But Cahill's novel very much stands on its own and is worthy of admiration for its handling of complex histories, its deeply woven intertextualities, and its presentation of Daisy, Woolf's minor character, as fully fleshed and realized.' (Introduction)

'Based on the seventeenth-century journal of a shipwrecked Dutch sailor, and testimonies of surviving Korean 'Comfort Women,' Typhoon Kingdom is a story of war, romance, and survival that brings to life the devastating history of Korea at crucial moments in its struggle for independence.

In 1653, the Dutch East India Company’s Sparrowhawk is wrecked on a Korean island, and Hae-jo, a local fisherman, guides the ship’s bookkeeper to Seoul in search of his surviving shipmates. The two men, one who has never ventured to the mainland, and the other unable to speak the language, are soon forced to choose between loyalty to each other, and a king determined to maintain his country’s isolation.

Three-hundred years later, in the midst of the Japanese occupation, Yoo-jin is taken from her family and forced into prostitution, and a young soldier must navigate the Japanese surrender and ensuing chaos of the Korean War to find her.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'I came to this ancient city of child emperors, tea wars, and men who stare down tanks, hoping fossils from the Flaming Cliffs of the Mongolian Gobi might have made their way to the People's capital.' (Introduction)