Despite my expectations of a fast paced thriller this is a much more nuanced story; literary fiction with a side helping of crime and thriller. The story follows Eunha a Korean girl whose father is a Dragon Head (triad) leader. Eunha is brought up in a quiet village in the New Territories, Hong Kong, by her grandmother, with only her brother Solomon and a boy called Kai for company. Slow paced, moving between the present and Eunha’s formative years, I found this a compelling read; I really loved it. Briefly, the story starts when Eunha is at the harbour with her son and he disappears. It soon becomes clear that he has been kidnapped. Her search for him leads her back to the world she has tried to avoid for many years; she meet up with Kai who is now a triad leader and an attraction begins to develop between these childhood friends. Eunha is a brilliant character and the flashbacks explain a lot of her choices in the present. She is strong and determined and copes with everything thrown at her, her sheltered upbringing, unhappy marriage, kidnapped son and the realisation of the brutality and criminality of her family life. I spend a fair bit of time in Hong Kong, largely in the 1980/90’s and I could see and smell the places described so clearly. If you are looking for a high octane thriller then this isn’t it. If you are looking for a beautiful character driven novel about relationships, forbidden and familial love and emotional drama then stop right here! Wonderful read.

The Devoted is a tender behemoth of a book, powerful, bold, and yet also quiet and beautiful. It’s one of the most impressive fiction debuts I’ve read in ages, and I cannot recommend it enough. Think Pachinko meets The Godfather, with a dash of Romeo and Juliet. There’s betrayal, betrothal, a tragic romance for the ages, secrets within secrets, and an absolutely breathtaking journey through the lens of a character that follows the path of a phoenix, broken and remade into something new. It’s a book about sacrifice, loyalty, and ultimately, love — where the limits of love are drawn, and how those lines govern our lives. We follow Eunha as her family connection to the mob poses a threat to her child, and she’s separated from him under the guise of protection. This forced separation provides the catalyst for a series of devastatingly momentous events in Eunha’s life, and we live through every single one of them with her. This book isn’t so much read as experienced. We feel what she feels. We yearn for what she yearns. We hope for what she hopes. As her sentimental love for a childhood sweetheart burns into reality, Eunha sets our hearts alight. But make no mistake — this is not a romance. It’s not a love story. Rather, it’s an exploration of loyalty, allegiance, and devotion, and how those things are expressed within the shifting dynamics of a family. This is an upmarket literary novel that somehow manages to achieve tight pacing and thoughtful introspection, keeping you both on the edge of your seat while softening your imagination to accept the impact of a life spent juggling the roles of daughter, sister, wife, lover, and mother. There’s so much to admire in Cho’s prose. She has a transportive element to her writing, and she graces it with a subtle kind of elegance that makes it lush without seeming flamboyant. It’s not a showy style, and yet, there’s so much clarity in her voice. If you enjoyed Inferno (the memoir of motherhood that Cho wrote about her experiences with post-partum psychosis) you’ll find plenty of the same strengths appearing here, including the theme of motherhood and separation, the same wonderful style that made her memoir so affecting, and careful, layered observations in her prose that pack a hefty punch. Overall, The Devoted is a debut with plenty to admire. Its atmosphere is addictive. Its characters are both familiar and intriguing. The plot is peppered with poignancy that doesn’t strip away any of its power or propulsion. This is seriously impressive stuff. Catherine Cho is one to watch. One read of this, and you’ll find yourself devoted to whatever she decides to cook up next.

I was absolutely transfixed from the first page. The story follows Eunha who is the daughter of the leader of an infamous criminal organisation as she navigates the life she is in. She grows up in a small village in Hong Kong, raised by her grandmother alongside her older brother and their friend Kai- they live a quiet life shielded from their father’s organisation. But Eunha gets married off to a wealthy man and when her son Minsuk is kidnapped her life begins to fall apart. This book had me in a chokehold, I didn’t want to put it down at all. I cared so deeply for the characters especially Eunha, Solomon and Kai. Flashing back to their childhood growing up knowing what would be expected of them made the story so much more devastating. I felt my heart break at so many points in this book because they all deserved the world but were held back by life and circumstances. I won’t spoil anything of course but I was rooting so hard for some of these characters but was often painfully let down because some had become set in their ways after all this time. It was so sad to think of these characters as they were when they were children, their innocence and happiness contrasting so starkly with them as adults that it was often hard to accept that they were the same person. Honestly, the writing was absolutely masterful.

I finished this book a couple weeks ago and have been sitting on the story, it's stuck in my brain so I'm reviewing it because a book that persistent is one for the books (pun intended). The story follows a Eunha as she's raised with her brother, almost completely sheltered from her father's violent occupation. Her grandmother does her best to protect them from the bloody inheritance but it's a constant in the periphery of her life and of the story, a slow-creeping, suffocating pressure that builds and builds throughout her life. When her son is kidnapped, things go south, FAST, and she's forced away from her respectable marriage and into the life she had been shielded from her whole life; back, even, into the arms of the first boy she loved who just so happens to be a Dragon Head himself. I loved how much time the story covered while still remaining focused on Eunha's internal experiences of the changing reality around her. It felt like we were watching her watching her life, her inexperience with this world, the time spent away from both her brother and Kai, all creating layers of separation between the reader and the reality of the organised crime goings on. This distance from the 'action' allowed for intense emotional exploration that felt entirely intentional, Eunha's overwhelm, the frantic energy around finding answers, people dying around her, money, her previous life crumbling- it was all so brilliantly written. There felt a constant emotional tautness, a tension between the desperate love she has for her son, the resurgent feelings for Kai, and the grief over all that she had lost and was still losing, a swirling down the drain of all the attempts to escape what she was born into, for, away from, in spite of. The landscape of betrayal, power struggles, bloody violence, honour codes, family loyalty was ever-present, imposing the anxiety around that danger onto the most soft, intimate moments. Eunha and her son, her struggling with letting her brother into her life but wanting him and the shadow of his life away from them, her yearning for Kai. You feel as if you can't escape the blood, the danger, the violence, and yet Cho writes these scenes so eloquently that the reader is able to feel them so deeply within the bubble of the scene. I love that the experience of reading reflects Eunha's experience, the quiet moments as small reprieves from the ever building intensity of the world around her, the constant scheming of the people in her life for their own gains, their own ideas of honour and loyalty and retaliation. I loved Eunha's character development, the way she builds her future from the scraps of her old life and slivers of this new life that she is now beholden to without ever really being invited into. The ending was so vindicating, so satisfying; it's a relief, a conclusion, while still holding sacred the pain and impact of what has come before it. Her relationships with her brother and with Kai were so doomed, but in a way that held two truths at once. That love can exist in shades, and that two people who may have loved each other were still existing within the confines of the cards life had dealt them. The things you can do despite loving someone, because you love someone so much. I am so impressed by all the kinds of love and grief Cho has explored through this one woman's narrative, the breadth of human experience contained within a few hundred pages of small moments and big decisions is so beautiful!