Greek Lessons

A powerful novel of the saving grace of language and human connection, from the celebrated author of International Booker Prize winner The Vegetarian.
"Now and then, language would thrust its way into her sleep like a skewer through meat, startling her awake several times a night..."
In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but can't. Accustomed to her silence, the teacher is sympathetic—day by day he is losing his eyesight. But beyond their losses, a deeper pain binds them. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages.
Greek Lessons tells the stories of two ordinary people, their lives heightened by private anguish—where the light of a man losing his vision meets the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two slowly find one another through a sense of connection—their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to breath.
Greek Lessons is a book to awaken the senses, one that vividly conjures the essence of what it means to be alive, and a remarkable love letter to human contact and tenderness.