When Yeong-hye decides to stop eating meat, her husband, parents and sister are thrown into turmoil. This is Korea, where almost no one understands why anyone would want to be a vegetarian.

What was merely inexplicable soon turns unfathomable as Yeong-hye changes palpably, seemingly withdrawing from life as she insists on not eating even a morsel of meat. Social derision, familial pressure, an embarrassed and, finally, enraged, husband cannot force her to change her mind. Yeong-hye wastes away, but what does she want?

A novel that actually comprises three inter-connected, self-contained novellas that follow Yeong-hye on her journey – or is it a quest? – with her husband, her brother-in-law, and then her sister – Korean writer Hang Kang’s novel The Vegetarian is unlike anything even in post-modern contemporary world fiction.

Deborah Smith’s translation won the novel the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for translated fiction, beating out books by, among others, Orhan Pamuk. Translator Daniel Hahn describes the novel in The Guardian as “a bracing, visceral, system-shocking addition to the Anglophone reader’s diet”.

Published in Korean in 2007. Translated into English by Deborah Smith, published in 2015.