Join debut novelist Jiyoung Han as she presents Honey in the Wound, a lyrical and suspenseful epic about a mysteriously gifted Korean family confronting the brutality of the Japanese empire.

A sister disappears and returns as a tiger. A mother's voice compels the truth from any tongue. A granddaughter divines secrets in others' dreams. What happens when magical gifts become weapons of resistance against empire?

Spanning ninety years as one family is displaced across Asia, this novel follows Young-Ja, who finds herself struggling to survive after her family is killed by Japanese soldiers. The magical gift that once brought her joy—the ability to infuse her cooking with her feelings: love, peace, delight—transforms into something more powerful as her sorrow and anger seep into her confections.

When her talent is noticed by a Korean resistance fighter, she's taken to Manchuria where she becomes enmeshed in a network of spies at a teahouse favoured by Japanese officials. Haunted at every turn by the spectre of Japanese soldiers, she endures horrors and brutality at the hands of the Imperial Army.

Join us for an evening exploring how fiction can give voice to silenced histories and how magic can become a form of resistance. With spellbinding inter-generational sweep and atmospheric magical realism, Jiyoung will explore the ways colonialism forces one family to transform, and ultimately survive.