This charming and warm hearted novel tells the story of Yeongju, a woman who is burnt out from a high-flying career, and a failed marriage which has brought shame on her family and caused a rift with her parents; so she opens a bookshop. Gradually, she gathers a community around her, and they all find a new way to live. The pressure of life in South Korea, expectation around careers and conventional ways of living, is extraordinary. There's quite a lot of discussion around this in the novel, and also discussion of books and philosophy. It's a gentle book, in which the dialogue is formal, even a bit stilted at times, but it all rings true, and the reader is sympathetic to all the characters. It's a lovely book.