The Hole

Following a devastating car crash that killed his wife, Oghi wakes in hospital to find himself trapped in his own body and under the control of his vengeful mother-in-law as she grieves the loss of her only child.

Isolated from his friends and neglected by his nurse, Oghi’s world shrinks to the room he lies in and his memories of his wife, a sensitive woman who found solace in cultivating her garden.

But as Oghi remains alone and paralysed, his mother-in-law is hard at work in the now-abandoned garden, uprooting what her daughter had worked so hard to plant and obsessively digging larger and larger holes…

A bestseller in Korea, The Hole is a superbly crafted and deeply unnerving novel about the horrors of isolation and neglect in all of its banal and brutal forms.