Catherine Cho

Inferno is the riveting memoir of a young mother who is separated from her newborn son and husband when she's involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward in New Jersey after a harrowing bout of postpartum psychosis. When Catherine Cho and her husband set off from London to introduce their newborn son to family scattered across the United States, she could not have imagined what lay in store. Before the trip’s end, she develops psychosis, a complete break from reality, which causes her to lose all sense of time and place, including what is real and not real. In desperation, her husband admits her to a nearby psychiatric hospital, where she begins the hard work of rebuilding her identity. In this unwaveringly honest, insightful, and often shocking memoir Catherine reconstructs her sense of self, starting with her childhood as the daughter of Korean immigrants, moving through a traumatic past relationship, and on to the early years of her courtship with and marriage to her husband, James. She masterfully interweaves these parts of her past with a vivid, immediate recounting of the days she spent in the ward. The result is a powerful exploration of psychosis and motherhood, at once intensely personal, yet holding within it a universal experience – of how we love, live and understand ourselves in relation to each other.

A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness

Inferno

In this emotionally transportive literary debut about family and fate, a young Korean woman becomes entrenched in an infamous crime organization—and the dangerous world she once sought to escape.

Raised in Hong Kong by their Korean grandmother in a quiet village, Eunha and her brother Solomon live a sheltered life. Their father is a Dragon Head, a leader within the infamous criminal organization of the Triads. While their beloved grandmother does her best to shield the children from the constant hum of violence and fear that surrounds their father and his world, Eunha only has Solomon and their one permitted companion, a boy named Kai, for company.

But as Eunha grows up and marries into a supposedly respectable Hong Kong family, the veneer of her careful life begins to crack. When her young son is kidnapped, she is cast into the city’s criminal underground and back into the orbit of Kai, now a Dragon Head himself.

Will Eunha finally give in to the life she has strived so hard to rise above or was her future always fated?

The Devoted is at once a sweeping family drama, a moving account of forbidden love, and a story about a woman’s determination to choose her own destiny.

The Devoted

Catherine und James wollen die Elternzeit mit ihrem Sohn Cato für eine Reise nutzen und die Familie in den USA besuchen. Doch unerwartet wird Catherine von ihren kulturellen Wurzeln eingeholt: Nach koreanischer Tradition dürfen Mutter und Kind 100 Tage lang das Haus nicht verlassen. Kurz vor Ablauf dieser Frist beugt Catherine sich über das Bettchen ihres Sohnes und glaubt plötzlich, ein rotes Glimmen in seinen Augen zu erkennen. Und sie hört eine Stimme, die ihr befiehlt, ihren Sohn zu töten...

Catherine Cho

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