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.


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 “virtuosic” (Vanity Fair) 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?


__Location: Russian Far East, Costa Brava, Japan, London, New York, South Korea