“Please Look After Mom is the most moving and accomplished, and often startling, novel in translation I've read in many seasons,” says Japan-based writer Pico Iyer. “The book has sold 1.5 million copies already in South Korea, an extraordinary figure in a nation with fewer than 50 million citizens.”

In 2011, Shin became the first Korean and the first woman to win the Man Asian Literary Prize beating Haruki Murakami, Amitav Ghosh, Rahul Bhattacharya and Banana Yoshimoto. Translated into 32 languages, the book begins with the sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo, who gets separated from her husband among the crowds of the big subway station in Seoul where they have arrived to visit their now-grown children. The family mobilises to find her and a long, desperate search begins.

However, not one of them possesses a single photograph of hers. They post and distribute flyers, follow sightings throughout the city of a “disoriented figure in blue plastic sandals” but all endeavours fail as “she slips out of the narrative as obliquely as she absents herself from family portraits.” We watch the same story unfold through the eyes of the family's eldest daughter, the eldest son, the husband and, finally, the lost mother herself.

The big question is – did they actually know the woman they called Mom? Is who she is on her own separate from who she is with her family?

The author warns against an over-literal interpretation of her novel. “It’s the mother who goes missing, but that’s a metaphor,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be the mom who disappears; it could be anything precious to us that has been lost, as we’ve moved from a traditional society to a modern society.”

“In the West, that shift took place more than half a century ago; but the transformations that the novel charts are of more recent vintage, and occurred in the author’s lifetime, as democracy and prosperity in South Korea flourished,” says Liesl Schillinger in The Daily Beast.

Published in 2009, translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim, published in 2011.