The Consultant

A star of Korean crime, this leads the pack among The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-Eun (winner of the CWA Dagger in translation 2020), The Plotters by Kim Un-Su ('the next Scandi noir'- Guardian), and Bruised Fruit by Gu Byeong-mo (coming Feb 2022)

'It's a clever book ... [Im Seong-sun] offers readers his razor-sharp observations on consumerism, capitalism and what it means to feel anonymous' M.W. Craven _______________ Sometimes work can be murder... The Consultant is very good at his job. He creates simple, elegant, effective solutions for. restructuring. Nothing obvious or messy. Certainly nothing anyone would ever suspect as murder. The 'natural deaths' he plans have always gone well: a medicine replaced here, a mechanism jammed there. His performance reviews are excellent. And it's not as though he knows these people. Until his next 'customer' turns out to be someone he not only knows but cares about, and for the first time, he begins to question the role he plays in the vast, anonymous Company. And as he slowly begins to understand the real scope of their work, he realises just how easy it would be for the Company to arrange one more perfect murder... But how far will he go to escape The Company? And how far will they go to stop him? The electrifying first novel from award-winning Korean thriller-writer Im Seong-Sun - now in English for the first time - combines the tension of the best crime fiction with searing social criticism to present a searing take-down of global corporate life.

Im Seong-sun's writing career took off with his Segye Literary Award winning novel, The Consultant, in 2010. Ever since, he's written an array of critically acclaimed, diverse fiction and nonfiction, such as a short story collection The Sheeple Wandering a Gallery and their Predators, novels Moon Geunyoung Is in Danger, Rather Kind People Live Here, The Arctic Ocean, The Paragon of Self Improvement, and Ouroboros, and recently, an essay collection Third Wheel of No Use. In 2019, he received the Young Writer's Award and the Korean Sci-fi Award. An Seon Jae (aka Brother Anthony of Taizé) was born in England in 1942. He studied at the Queen's College in Oxford. He joined the Community of Taizé in 1969. He has been living in Korea since 1980, and taught English literature at Sogang University, where he is now an emeritus professor, until he retired in 2007. He is also a chair-professor at Dankook University. He has translated works by many major contemporary Korean writers, mostly poetry, publishing well over 50 volumes. He served as President of the Royal Asiatic Society (Korea) for ten years and is now its President Emeritus. He was awarded an Honorary MBE in 2015. His home page URL is http://anthony.sogang.ac.kr/