11 Powerful Coming-of-Age Stories Set in Korea

South Korea’s recent influence in the world economy, media, and culture has been nothing short of spectacular. South Korean author Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature and other Korean American writers have also been recognized for their contributions. Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker won the Pen/Hemingway Prize in 1996, Linda Sue Park’s The Single Shard was a Newbury Medal winner in 2002, and Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2017. There is a growing demand for stories about Korea, and this list of coming-of-age stories set in Korea provides a peek into just a few that deserve to be read.

As a Korean American author of the debut novel, White Mulberry, I have been especially attracted to coming-of-age stories set in Korea that explore displacement, identity, belonging, and home at a unique time in history. These are the themes in my historical novel about a spirited Korean girl coming of age in 1930’s Japan-occupied Korea who goes to Japan in search of a better future, only to face racial persecution, heartbreaking loss, and a choice that will change her life—and the life of those she loves—forever. My protagonist’s personal journey is meaningful to me because it is based on the true story of my own grandmother. 

This reading list consists mostly of adult, coming-of-age books that have been written by Korean American authors in English over the last ten years. I have included two Korean novels in translation, and one that covers contemporary North Korea that was written in the mid-2000s. These stories capture the lives and minds of young characters who live in, leave, or return to Korea and whose roots and hearts are inextricably bound to the peninsula. 

Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim

This poignant debut novel portrays a young girl who is sold by her family to a courtesan school in Korea during Japan’s colonization and becomes swept up in the Korean Independence Movement. The first scene of a hunter and a tiger is a gripping metaphor for the political tension and struggle against Japanese occupation that is depicted in the rest of the book. Kim’s second novel, City of Night Birds, is due out later this year. 

Skull Water by Heinz Insu Fenkl

Skull Water is a largely autobiographical novel about a conflicted, mixed-race teenager who returns to Korea from America in the 1970s and is torn between the world he left behind and his new home outside a U.S. military base in South Korea. After hearing a legend about water collected in a human skull that cures illnesses,Insu embarks on a journey to heal his ailing Big Uncle,  and along the way, he learns that magical spirits from the past have the potential to help the living. Structured using hexagrams from the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, that was a keen interest to his Big Uncle, Fenkl honors stories across time and a little-known period of South Korean history. Fenkl’s first autobiographical novel, Memories of My Ghost Brother, follows younger Insu as he grows up being haunted by the ghost figure of a secret half-brother and is another remarkable read.  

The Evening Hero by Marie Myung-Ok Lee

Lee paints a sweeping, often satirical, portrait of an aging immigrant doctor in the U.S. and the long-term effects of childhood trauma, war, and displacement on identity and belonging. Deeply researched and alternating between time periods, the novel shows that the present cannot be understood without the past. The coming-of-age story of Doctor Kwak is especially poignant as it follows the lives of two brothers who grow up without parents, country, and home and will never see each other again. It is only when Doctor Kwak returns to North Korea, where the brothers grew up, on a medical mission, is he able to make peace with the boy he once was and the childhood that was lost.

The Stone Home by Crystal Hana Kim

This propulsive and haunting coming-of-age novel, told through the perspectives of two teens who are taken to a reformatory center in South Korea in 1980, exposes a dark period of South Korean history. Inspired by true events, it tells the story of a group of young survivors of a state-sanctioned “rehabilitation” home for vagrant children and who, despite their horrific treatment, find one other and the courage to hope. A gripping novel, it questions our capacity for evil and challenges us to examine stories that have been silenced. Kim is the author of If You Leave Me, a critically acclaimed novel  about two ill-fated lovers in Korea in the years surrounding its civil war. 

The Liberators by E.J. Koh

Author of the acclaimed memoir The Magical Language of Others, E.J. Koh brings us a lyrical and poetic novel about a young woman and her search for meaning and hope as she leaves South Korea in 1980 at the height of a military dictatorship to carve a new home in America for herself and her young family. Insuk, a new mother, navigates a difficult relationship with her husband and mother-in-law, and finds herself in an illicit affair that will echo for generations to come. Koh eloquently examines whether we can ever be free of the memory and trauma of the past, and suggests that liberation comes not from governments, lands, and borders, but from creating and nourishing deep bonds between people.

The Kinship of Secrets by Eugenia Kim

Almost ten years following the publication of her moving coming-of-age novel The Calligrapher’s Daughter, Eugenia Kim brings another heartfelt story which follows two young Korean sisters who are separated by war, one staying in Korea and the other moving to America. Their parents believe the family will be reunited soon, but the Korean War breaks out and the daughter who remains in Korea grapples with the cruelty of war and its aftermath while the other grows up in American suburbia, leading vastly different lives. When they meet again in America, the teen sisters are confronted with cultural gaps that threaten to destroy their ties, but they ultimately learn that family secrets can protect, and kinship is forever.

Jia: A Novel of North Korea by Hyejin Kim

Although written over 15 years ago and based on true events, this illuminating North Korea novel is the first to be published in the West.  A timeless coming of age story told from the point of view of an orphan whose skills as a dancer propels her to escape to China and forge her own future. Surviving floods, famine, and a harrowing escape across an ice-cold river, Jia arrives in China, only to live in a cave and be abducted and trafficked as a prostitute. She is saved by a Korean Chinese man and assumes a new identity but will forever be haunted by the tragedy of her homeland. 

My Brilliant Life by Ae-ran Kim, Translated by Chi-Young Kim

This contemporary novel, set in South Korea, is a tender, moving story of a boy born of teenage parents who has a rare genetic disorder that causes him to age rapidly. Told from the point of view of 16-year-old Areum, whose body is that of an 80-year-old man, we witness him writing his parents’ love story as a final gift to them, forming a unique friendship with an elderly neighbor, and coming to terms with his own deteriorating condition. At once humorous, heartwarming, and heart-wrenching, this book offers profound insight into what it’s like to grow up with a disability and find hope even in the briefest of lives.

Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park, Translated by Anton Hur

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022, this dazzling novel follows the life of a young gay man navigating friendships, family, and relationships against the backdrop of lonely, modern-day Seoul. Moving from his early twenties to thirties, the narrator befriends a girl who becomes his best friend and roommate, only to lose her when she chooses to marry. He enters into a series of relationships with men searching for love and connection but is left empty as he deals with his ill mother. Touching on themes of sexual identity, loss, and societal pressure, Sang Young Park’s English language debut provides a heart-thumping view of contemporary Seoul and a raw, intimate view into queer life in Korea.

Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History by Margaret Juhae Lee

When debut author Margaret Juhae Lee set out to discover the legacy of her student revolutionary grandfather, what she didn’t expect to find was a reclamation of her own history beginning as a girl of ten visiting the homeland of her parents for the first time. Through decades of insightful research, interviews with her grandmother, and investigative journalism, Lee unearthed details of her grandfather’s imprisonment that exonerated him as a teenage Communist who defied Japan’s harsh colonial rule and rewrote all that the family knew about him. In beautiful prose, Lee also shares her personal journey of excavating the past to help gain greater understanding of herself and her own lost history.

The All-American by Joe Milan, Jr.

17-year-old Bucky, a Korean adoptee from Washington State, wants nothing more than to be a college football player. When a bureaucratic mistake forces him to be deported to South Korea, Bucky finds himself with a new Korean name, serving in the Korean military, and repaying the debts of his long-lost biological father. Through Bucky’s misadventures from an expat bar in Seoul to a remote island where he gets caught up with a crazed sergeant who still fights North Korean enemies, Milan has crafted a poignant, contemporary coming-of-age novel that explores identity, masculinity, and finding home.

Rosa Kwon Easton is the author of the debut novel White Mulberry, coming December 1, 2024, and Red Seal, the sequel, forthcoming in 2026. Easton is an Anaphora Writing Residency Fellow, a lawyer, and an elected trustee of the Palos Verdes Library District. Her work has been published in CRAFT Literary, StoryCenter.org, Writer’s Digest, and elsewhere. Born in Seoul, South Korea, she grew up in Los Angeles and lives with her husband and Maltipoo in sunny Southern California. For more information, visit www.rosakwoneaston.com.