The Disaster Tourist

A Harper's Bazaar Best Book of the Year

This tale of complicity and denial (reintroduced in a new English translation by Lizzie Buehler this summer) feels nauseatingly on point this year. Hurtling from a Seoul office building to a remote desert island in Southeast Asia, Yun's late-capitalist satire makes the case that the identity we find through work is almost always shaped by how we have been exploited--or how we have exploited others . . . As in the real world, death in The Disaster Tourist becomes more optional the more powerful you are. --Madeline Leung Coleman, The Atlantic

Yun's cool, clinical prose is devoid of sentimentality; her deadpan delivery both advances the morbidly hilarious plot and amplifies the drama of ecological disaster made for tourist profit . . . Yun blends satire with metafictional play: her characters meld into the pages of their books; sentences and screenplays bleed out into reality . . . This is an extravagant, clever, unpredictable story that walks the razor edge of horror-comedy . . . The Disaster Tourist lays out contemporary life as a theatre of absurdity: all begin as dark, dark comedies about office anhedonia and veer into colourful chaos. --Esther Kim, The White Review

Yun Ko-eun presents a dystopian feminist ecothriller that takes on climate change, sexual assault, greed and dark tourism. This is a unique, mysterious and engrossing novel. --Karla Strand, Ms. Magazine

Following a spate of recent fiction considering the strange intersection of our work and leisure lives--novels such as Ling Ma's apocalyptic satire Severance and Sayaka Murata's oddly affecting Convenience Store Woman--The Disaster Tourist offers up another fresh and sharp story about life under late capitalism . . . Witty and absurd, then suspenseful, even terror-filled . . . This is an entertaining eco-thriller that sets out to illuminate the way climate change is inextricably bound up with the pressures of global capitalism.--Saba Ahmed, The Guardian

[A] mordantly witty novel . . . This propulsive novel reads like a highly literary, ultra-incisive thriller; it reminds us that the disasters with which we are now grappling with on a near daily basis are not acts of god, they're acts of man. --Kristin Iverson, Refinery29

Fits perfectly into a growing wave of eco-thrillers and darkly funny fiction that grapples with climate change . . . It's a witty, unsentimental, grimly believable story that neatly weaves together sharp critiques of capitalism, the heartlessness it rewards, and the poverty, environmental disasters, and misogyny it engenders. --Arianna Rebolini, BuzzFeed

This firecracker of a novel from South Korean writer Ko-eun could not be more timely, with themes around climate tourism, activism, and the #MeToo movement . . . This is a fast-paced thriller-esque story that skillfully addresses individual complicity in harm, and the morality of a fascination with disaster. --Sarah Neilson, Shondaland

The Disaster Tourist poses an uneasy question: Are we, as humans, observing the disaster or creating it? The characters each play a role in answering this . . . Around Yun's characters, the natural landscape absorbs, adapts to, and reacts to these interventions, providing hidden avenues for both destruction and redemption--depending on which path a character chooses. --Ysabelle Cheung, Sierra Magazine

A compact and propulsive dystopian thriller that stands out as one of 2020's best works of translated literature. --Sophia Stewart, Asymptote Journal

Unsettling, off-kilter, and at times very funny . . . The novel is deeply moral without feeling moralizing, and its anxiety feels free-floating until it builds to a fever pitch. Read it, and find some relief in the fact that you won't be traveling for a while. --Jessie Gaynor, Literary Hub

A tightly plotted, whip-smart satire, and the stakes heighten with every page. Ko-Eun's writing is unpretentious, deadpan, and often very funny . . . [Yun Ko-eun] masterfully weaves big-picture critiques of cultural appropriation and opportunism with the more delicate threads of human complexity. --CJ Green, Zyzzyva

Lays bare the inherent inauthenticity of the tourist experience--especially those that purport to be beneficial, even humanitarian, for the local community--and does so in a way that will make you creepily uncomfortable about all your past travel adventures. --Siel Ju, Los Angeles Review of Books

South Korean author Yun's spare but provocative novel offers perceptive satire laced with disconcerting imagery . . . Yun cleverly combines absurdity with legitimate horror and mounting dread. With its arresting, nightmarish island scenario, this work speaks volumes about the human cost of tourism in developing countries.--Publishers Weekly (starred review)