Snow Hunters: A Novel

“Exquisitely enigmatic…a small but radiant star in the current literary firmament” (The Dallas Morning News), Snow Hunters traces the extraordinary journey of Yohan, a 25-year-old North Korean POW refugee who defects from his country at the end of the Korean War, leaving his friends & family behind to seek a new life in a port town on the coast of Brazil.

Though he is a stranger in a strange land, throughout the years in this town, 4 people slip in & out of Yohan’s life: Kiyoshi, the Japanese tailor for whom he works, & who has his own secrets & a past he does not speak of; Peixe, the groundskeeper at the town church; & two vagrant children named Santi & Bia, a boy & a girl, who spend their days in the alleyways & the streets of the town. Yohan longs to connect with these people, but to do so he must sift through the wreckage of his traumatic past so he might let go & move on.

In Snow Hunters, “quotidian-surreal craft-master” (NY magazine) Paul Yoon proves love can dissolve loneliness; that hope can wipe away despair; & that a man who lost a country can find a new home. “The brief, simple sentences that form this elegant tone poem of a novel…have the effect of making you slow down to read them—which is a fitting way to experience the story of a man unmoored by memory & time” (Entertainment Weekly). This is a heartrending story of second chances, told with unerring elegance & absolute tenderness.

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“Yoon’s debut novel began as a 500-p. draft pared down to about 200 p that reveal the same shimmering, evocative spareness of his 2009 collection, Once the Shore. The result is that rare, precious gem, with every remaining word to be cherished for the many discarded to achieve perfection..