Apartment Women
​​​by Gu Byeong-mo

A December 2024 Read in Ms. Magazine

*INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER*

From the New York Times Notable author of The Old Woman with the Knife comes a bracingly original story of family, marriage and the cultural expectations of motherhood, about four women whose lives intersect in dramatic and unexpected ways at a government-run apartment complex outside Seoul.

When Yojin moves with her husband and daughter into the Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments, she’s ready for a fresh start. Located on the outskirts of Seoul, the experimental community is a government initiative designed to boost the national birth rate. Like her neighbors, Yojin has agreed to have at least two more children over the next ten years.

Yet, from the day she arrives, Yojin feels uneasy about the community spirit thrust upon her. Her concerns grow as communal child care begins and the other parents show their true colors. Apartment Women traces the lives of four women in the apartments, all with different aspirations and beliefs. Will they find a way to live peacefully? Or are the cultural expectations around parenthood stacked against them from the start?

A trenchant social novel from an award-winning author, Apartment Women incisively illuminates the unspoken imbalance of women’s parenting labor, challenging the age-old assumption that “it takes a village” to raise a child.

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Reviews
"Gu is an exciting writer in the contemporary renaissance in Korean art. Like the 2024 Nobel laureate Han Kang, Gu gives voice to the rich inner lives of women grappling with misogyny . . . A valuable look into the culture of communal living that has earned South Korea the nickname "the republic of apartments," this novel wisely invites readers into these spaces, to move through the design and derive its purpose for themselves."
--The New York Times 

“Reading this incisive, delicate and wholly original book, I found that words like ‘family’, ‘neighbor’, ‘nature’, and ‘community’ no longer evoked warm and bountiful images in me. They gave me a chill. And I know that this is reality.”
—Cho Nam-joo, author of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 

“Gu Byeong-mo’s Apartment Women is a sharp examination of the boundary between the utopic ideals of community and the dystopian realities of late capitalism. The characters—beautifully drawn, full of flaws and wholly human—live side-by-side in a tense intimacy that haunted me long after I put the book down.”
—Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, author of A Fire So Wild

"Meticulously translated by prize-winning Kim, Gu's bitingly perceptive observations about womanhood, wifehood, and motherhood adroitly provoke acute feelings of breathtaking claustrophobia amidst stifling societal expectations."
--Booklist

"Via breezy, engaging storytelling, Gu's realist novel explores the roles of women, with protagonists who discuss parenting and work-life balance while contending with meeting social, cultural, and societal mores. Readers will eagerly follow this story to see which couples, if any, succeed in meeting the concept behind this distinctive living situation. A good pick for book clubs."
--Library Journal

"Piercing . . . Keenly portrays the toll taken by gendered expectations. This is a perceptive novel of motherhood's double binds."
--Publishers Weekly