Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop

  • Author: Hwang Bo-Reum
  • Page count: 308
  • Started on: 2025/11/18
  • Finished on: 2025/11/23
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    • ★★★★☆

Illustrated book cover for Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum, showing a cozy bookstore with a brick upper floor and a shop window filled with books. A woman stands at the entrance, and a man rides a bicycle past flowering trees. The sky is blue with soft clouds. Text reads “National Bestseller,” “Translated by Shanna Tan,” and “A Novel.”

If Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop were a movie, it’d be the ultimate feel-good movie. The novel centers on a woman who leaves her corporate job to run a quiet bookshop in a Seoul neighborhood, finding healing, community, and self-discovery among books and new friendships.

It follows the bookshop from its beginning over several years, and slowly increases its cast of characters who share the struggles in their lives with each other and the reader. The bookshop becomes a central place for the owner and many others from the neighborhood.

I loved this book because it covers similar topics to many self-help books, but then in the form of a novel. Many of the characters are running away (or learning to do so) from the constant pressure to meet others’ expectations of them, and many value slowness and stillness over the constant hustle. The short chapters (5-10 minutes) make this an easy read that may help you feel good too about your choices in life.

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