Jung-Myung Lee’s (이정명) “The Investigation” longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2015

Cover of "The Investigation"The Investigation by Jung-Myung Lee (translated by Chi-Young Kim) has been longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. KTLIT really liked this book when it first came out, saying it was, “a crime-thriller, wrapped in a historical novel, with strong aspirations to literary fiction.”  It’s a really great story, and among stiff competition (The dread Murukami^^ among others) The summary below is partially drawn from KTLIT’s previous post:

The novel is set in a prison camp in Fukuoka near the end of World War II and its historical aspect focuses on the prison camp life, and death, of Korean poet Yun Dong-ju, the author of Sky, Wind, Stars, who died in a Japanese prison camp. A young Japanese guard, Yuichi Watanabe, is tasked by his boss with discovering the murderer of another Japanese guard, Sugiyama, who is killed in brutal fashion, hung, and his lips sutured shut. Sugiyama was a brute, the miracle survivor of a massacre and a man feared by all prisoners and other guards. Watanabe, on the other hand, is in parts innocent and clever, and when he unearths, and gets a confession from, the murderer, the crime drama is only beginning.

Jung-Myung Lee has sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his books in his native Korea. One, Deep Rooted Tree, was made into a popular TV series.

Chi-Young Kim is the celebrated translator of the Man Asian Booker Prize-winning international bestseller Please Look After Mother by Kyung-Sook Shin, The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly by Hwang Sun-mi, and several other great books..