The Hive and the Honey

From the beloved award-winning author Paul Yoon comes a spectacular collection of unique stories, each confronting themes of identity, belonging, and the collision of cultures across countries and centuries.

Winner of The Story Prize
Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize
A Time Top 10 Best Fiction Book of 2023 and Must Read Book of 2023
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Library Journal, Electric Literature, and the New York Public Library

'Paul Yoon writes stories the way Fabergé made eggs: with untold craftsmanship, artistry, and delicacy.' Ann Patchett

'A master at finding depth of emotion in formal restraint.' Hernan Diaz

Absorbing...Yoon details fully realized and flawed characters attempting to wade through the complexities of immigrant life...[and] asks urgent questions about what it really means to belong somewhere.' Time, 100 Must-Read Books of 2023

A boy searches for his father, a prison guard on Sakhalin Island. In Barcelona, a woman is tasked with spying on a prizefighter who may or may not be her estranged son. A samurai escorts an orphan to his countrymen in the Edo Period. A formerly incarcerated man starts a new life in a small town in upstate New York and attempts to build a family.

The Hive and the Honey is a bold and indelible collection by celebrated author Paul Yoon, one that portrays the vastness and complexity of diasporic communities, with each story bringing to light the knotty inheritances of their characters. How does a North Korean defector connect with the child she once left behind? What are the traumas that haunt a Korean settlement in Far East Russia?

Lauded as a “quotidian-surreal craft-master” (New York magazine), Yoon’s stunning stories are laced with beauty and cruelty, and The Hive and the Honey is the work of an author writing at the very height of his powers.