PAUL YOON author of SNOW HUNTERS

“Behind every subtle gesture, this novel shimmers with a deep and complex history. Snow Hunters is a beautiful and moving meditation on a solitary life” (Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto).

In this elegant, haunting, and highly anticipated debut novel from 5 Under 35 National Book Foundation honoree Paul Yoon, a North Korean war refugee confronts the wreckage of his past. With spare, evocative prose, Snow Hunters traces the extraordinary journey of Yohan, who defects from his country at the end of the war, leaving his friends and 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, four people slip in and out of Yohan’s life: Kiyoshi, the Japanese tailor for whom he works, and who has his own secrets and a past he does not speak of; Peixe, the groundskeeper at the town church; and two vagrant children named Santi and Bia, a boy and a girl, who spend their days in the alleyways and the streets of the town. Yohan longs to connect with these people, but to do so he must sift through his traumatic past so he might let go and move on.

In Snow Hunters, Yoon proves that love can dissolve loneliness; that hope can wipe away despair; and that a man who has lost a country can find a new home. This is a heartrending story of second chances, told with unerring elegance and absolute tenderness. (Available August 2013)

Praise for Paul Yoon and Snow Hunters

 
“At first glance Paul Yoon appears to be the perfect miniaturist, but behind every subtle gesture this novel shimmers with a deep and complex history. Snow Hunters is a beautiful and moving meditation on a solitary life.”
 
-- Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto
 
 
“Paul Yoon’s sentences are startlingly beautiful. Lucid and clean and resonant, they build, in Snow Hunters, to form a novel that is deceptively light and extraordinarily tender.”
 
-- Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia and The Monsters of Templeton
 
 
“Snow Hunters reads like a dream.  In this quiet, evocative rendering, we espy lives muted by war, altered by loss and displacement, and ultimately mended by the salvaged threads of memories and love.  Paul Yoon’s writing intimates the emergence of a master stylist, each sentence a jewel to be admired.”
 
-- Vaddey Ratner, author of In the Shadow of the Banyan
 
 
“Paul Yoon offers a profound look at the consequences of war, and what it means to begin a new life in the wake of its devastations. Though unflinching in its depiction of loss, this novel is brimming with beauty: its observations of the natural and human worlds, its understanding of time and memory, its devotion to a singular consciousness, together offer a deep sense of consolation. Brief in length, Snow Hunters is truly expansive in its scope, and written in language as clear and bracing as snowmelt.”
 
-- Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Ms. Hempel Chronicles and Madeleine is Sleeping
 

A LETTER FROM
THE PUBLISHER

Marysue Rucci

Dear Reader,

Last year we introduced you to Simon Novels—a site that curates and previews the work of five exemplary writers whose fiction we’ll be publishing in the coming year.  Our hope is that this portal will give you a sense of the breadth and quality of the Simon & Schuster fiction list.

This year, I am thrilled to present five fiction gems—books that will transport you to disparate worlds, from the often hilarious panorama of contemporary California to a desolate mountainside in North Korea in the 1950s, and myriad places...