“Ghost story, family saga, parable, feminist reimagined myth: Angela Mi Young Hur’s hugely ambitious Folklorn is a spellbinding shape-shifter of a novel that tackles questions of race, culture, and history head-on, exploring the blurry boundaries between past and present, fact and fantasy, and personal and cultural—or cosmic.”
Available Now/ $26.95 / 416 pages
A New York Times Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novel of 2021
An NPR Best Book of 2021
A genre-defying, continents-spanning saga of Korean myth, scientific discovery, and the abiding love that binds even the most broken of families.
Elsa Park is a particle physicist at the top of her game, stationed at a neutrino observatory in the Antarctic, confident she's put enough distance between her ambitions and the family ghosts she's run from all her life. But it isn't long before her childhood imaginary friend—an achingly familiar, spectral woman in the snow—comes to claim her at last.
Years ago, Elsa's now-catatonic mother had warned her that the women of their line were doomed to repeat the narrative lives of their ancestors from Korean myth and legend. But beyond these ghosts, Elsa also faces a more earthly fate: the mental illness and generational trauma that run in her immigrant family, a sickness no less ravenous than the ancestral curse hunting her.
When her mother breaks her decade-long silence and tragedy strikes, Elsa must return to her childhood home in California. There, among family wrestling with their own demons, she unravels the secrets hidden in the handwritten pages of her mother’s dark stories: of women’s desire and fury; of magic suppressed, stolen, or punished; of the hunger for vengeance.
From Sparks Fellow, Tin House alumna, and Harvard graduate Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn is a wondrous and necessary exploration of the myths we inherit and those we fashion for ourselves.
Angela Mi Young Hur received a B.A. in English from Harvard and an MFA in Creative Writing from Notre Dame, where she won the Sparks Fellowship and the Sparks Prize, a post-graduate fellowship. Her debut The Queens of K-Town was published by MacAdam/Cage in 2007. Folklorn was chosen by Kelly Link for a Tin House novel mentorship through the Tin House Summer Workshop, where Hur also studied with Alexander Chee and Mat Johnson, and later with Peter Ho Davies at the Napa Valley Writers Conference.
Praise for Folklorn
"[A] beautiful meditation on childhood trauma as well as an exploration into Korean heritage... a gorgeous journey into the intersection of science and myth and how our past traumas shape us – but how they need not define us." —NPR "Best Books of 2021"
"An elegant punch to the face.... beautiful and hard and hungry, full of sharp, painful observations, slicing clichés open like prickly pears and devouring their hearts." —New York Times Book Review
“Vivid and delectable. Angela Hur is equally at home working in the fertile territories of myth and the fantastic as in the nuanced portrayal of a contemporary, complex family. I loved this.” —Kelly Link, Pulitzer Prize finalist and National bestselling author of Get In Trouble
“In Folklorn, Angela Mi Young Hur weaves the fantastic into the realism of a compelling family saga, creating a heartfelt novel as original as it is irresistible. Pick this up if you’re ready to not put it down.” —Mat Johnson, author of Pym and Loving Day
“Spectacular. . . . Hur writes with virtuosity and power, weaving together the ribbons of the mythic with the complex tapestry of family and history to create a gorgeous, moving whole.” —Kat Howard, author of An Unkindness of Magicians
“Dark, difficult, and riveting—Folklorn gave me endless trouble, and I appreciate it.” —R. F. Kuang, Astounding Award-winning author of The Poppy War
"A beautiful, liminal exploration of the world, physics, and complex families born and found, told with an added rush of the fantastic." —Fran Wilde, Nebula Award-winning author of Updraft and Riverland
“Folklorn is a work of capacious, original imagination: part supernatural mystery, part immigrant family story. Hur’s mixing and melding of genres is an inventive, elegant means of illuminating the dualities of diasporic experience, as well as a testament to the essential role of stories in understanding our identities.” —Peter Ho Davies, author of The Fortunes and A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself
“Angela Mi Young Hur weaves gorgeous Korean fables through a woman’s messy, international search for redemption and connection.” —Chia-Chia Lin, author of The Unpassing
“It’s haunting and spiritual and touching, and so unique. This is absolutely one to be cherished.” —“Tor.com 30 Most Anticipated Books of 2021”
“Blurring the lines between sci-fi and fantasy, Hur’s sophomore novel (after The Queens of K-Town) offers a complex meditation on intergenerational trauma . . . The honest look at prickly Elsa’s internalized racism is ambitious but often brutal in its unflinching execution…. conversations on minority life in majority white spaces are painfully accurate. This thought-provoking work will appeal to SFF fans who like their talk of particle physics side by side with fox spirits and fairy tales.” —Publishers Weekly