Inconvenient convenience store 2 - Korean novel by Kim Ho-yeon

Original Korean edition of 불편한 편의점 2 (Bulpyeonhan Pyeonuijeom 2), the sequel to the biggest Korean publishing phenomenon of recent years: Kim Ho-yeon's novel set in a small neighbourhood convenience store open around the clock.

The story returns to the ALWAYS store in Cheongpa-dong, a Seoul back street, a year and a half after the events of the first part, in the middle of summer. There is a new clerk behind the counter, and the familiar little ecosystem rearranges itself around him: manager Oh Seon-suk, the other shift workers, and the customers who come in late at night. Each is carrying something difficult — work, money, family, loneliness — and the shop works as the neutral ground where those lives cross and, almost without meaning to, help one another.

Anyone who read the first part will recognise the formula and find a little more depth here: the humour is still there, but the portrait of precarity is more insistent. Kim Ho-yeon writes about night-shift Korea, hourly contracts and impossible rents without ever raising his voice, and the emotion of the book comes precisely from that restraint. The setting is no accident either: the Korean pyeonuijeom is not just a shop but a piece of social infrastructure — always open, with a counter to eat standing up — which makes it an ideal stage for an ensemble novel.

The first instalment sold 700,000 copies and was the best-selling book in Korea in the first half of 2022 according to the combined Kyobo, Youngpoong and Yes24 charts. Its author, born in Seoul in 1974 and a graduate in Korean Language and Literature from Korea University, came to fiction by an unusual route: first as a film screenwriter, then as a comics writer, and only later as a novelist, after winning an award in 2013 for Mangwon-dong Brothers.

Recommended level: intermediate, roughly TOPIK 3-4. This is one of the most rewarding contemporary Korean novels for learners: short chapters, a great deal of dialogue and everyday vocabulary, though with plenty of colloquial, street-level speech.