A mock book cover design of Kyung-Sook Shin’s (@KyungSookShinAuthor) Violets, translated by Anton Hur, featuring two silhouetted figures laying in a meadow that’s teeming with violets.

What inspired me the most in creating this design was how the main character has a defining & deeply sapphic moment in her childhood: confessing her love for her best friend while they’re both completely soaked from falling into a river and drying off in a field. Her best friend then runs away and never sees her again, but this rejection (that I interpreted as out of fear rather than being unreciprocated) is something that the main character carries into the rest of her life, and quietly but constantly revisits in all her future relationships.

About The Book

San is twenty-two and alone when she happens upon a job at a flower shop in Seoul’s bustling city center. Haunted by childhood rejection, she stumbles through life—painfully vulnerable, stifled, and unsure. She barely registers to others, especially by the ruthless standards of 1990s South Korea.

Over the course of one hazy, volatile summer, San meets a curious cast of characters: the nonspeaking shop owner, a brash coworker, kind farmers, and aggressive customers. Fueled by a quiet desperation to jump-start her life, she plunges headfirst into obsession with a passing magazine photographer.

In Violets, best-selling author Kyung-Sook Shin explores misogyny, erasure, and repressed desire, as San desperately searches for both autonomy and attachment in the unforgiving reality of contemporary Korean society.