"This book is for fans of Won-Pyung Sohn's Almond and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, but this book really is reminiscent of the feelings I had from Claire Keegan's Foster. Its depiction of the surroundings and the subtle connecting and changes between or in the young characters are just heartbreaking and beautiful. I believe this author will be introduced and translated into international market sooner or later and this book will make a perfect entry point for this author." Danyo's Korean agent.
Over 40,000 copies sold in Korea alone
Author Danyo debuts with Dive, a YA fiction powerhouse that echoes Almond and Paint’s critical acclaim with vivid and meticulous sentences to cinematic descriptions of landscapes and dimensional characters.
It’s the year 2057 in Seoul, and all the ice of the world has melted to create a dystopia in which buildings are submerged under the sea. After cities are flooded and dams break, the survivors leave their apartments and settle in the mountains. Among them is Seonyul, a child who is not afraid of the depths of the water, who works as a “mulggun”, someone who explores the underwater to salvage objects of old. Seonyul, the mulggun of Nogo Mountain, and Woochan, the mulggun of Nam Mountain, become rivals, making a bet challenging each other to bring back from the water a booty cooler than what the other may bring. As Seonyul scavenges the water’s depths, they discover a machine that looks just like a human.
The machine is none other than the android Suho, awakened after being asleep for four years with four years of its memory deleted. What can be found in Suho’s lost memory of four years after Suho woke up in a world collapsed? In order to find the truth, Seonyul and Suho dive towards Seoul, a city submerged in water. Will Suho be able to face its past and recover itself?
Dive offers a vision of resilience and optimism, mixed with a powerful reflection on the moral complexity of personhood, agency, and dignity in a post-human world. In a society ravaged by climate disaster and war, children raised on mountaintops create new forms of kinship and survival, even in the absence of traditional family structures. The elegant descriptions of sun-kissed ocean horizons and mysterious underwater cityscapes also lend a dreamlike beauty to the novel. Its overall mood reminds readers that even in the wreckage, something tender and hopeful can take root and blossom.