BROKEN SUMMER

A woman writes a damning novel about a character who closely resembles her husband, forcing him to face his culpability in a decades-old death.

What is the statute of limitations on betrayal? How long can a secret be buried before it turns into an earthquake? And will revealing the truth—that slippery concept—provide resolution or peace? Skillfully rendered into English by translator An, the novel contemplates these issues in a murder mystery notable for its nuanced storytelling. Lee Hanjo is a renowned artist whose heretofore-devoted wife decamps from their home the night of his 43rd birthday, leaving behind a copy of a forthcoming book she has written without his knowledge. Her “autobiographical fiction,” Your Lies About Me, is about a disreputable character who resembles Hanjo, and it upends his foundational suppositions about his childhood, marriage, and artistic abilities, reflecting the precarious nature of what people take, and make, to be true. “Some kinds of love have the power to reconstruct the past, the ability to restore a broken life,” Lee writes, and in this novel, some kinds of love also have the power to destroy every aspect of what one imagines one’s identity, and life, to be. The introduction of each new angle of Jang Jisoo’s death more than 20 summers ago both adds to our knowledge and blurs the exact truth of what occurred. The abstract art world in which Hanjo’s success fluctuates is equally a metaphor for how closely we examine or understand what isn’t concretely factual in “an era when images define reality.” Though relatively new to English-speaking audiences, Lee has sold millions of books in Korea, with adaptations into television series.

A subtle psychological thriller.