"Poignant” —Wall Street Journal

“I began this book late at night, intending to read one chapter, and emerged from its powerful enchantment a few hours later, having accidentally reached the end. A bewitching meditation on tenderness and violence, intimacy and estrangement, The Old Fire will transport you to an ancient and wild place, immersing you in its temperatures and rainfalls, its grief and grace and sound and silence. You won’t be the same when you leave it. A breathtaking achievement from one of my favorite living writers.” —Tess Gunty, National Book Award-winning author of The Rabbit Hutch

"A touching, mysterious novel, imbued with the beauty and strangeness of a fairy tale." —Aysegül Savas, author of The Anthropologists

“The Old Fire traces the silences within a family, alongside the muscle memory of childhood intimacy and our attempts to break through loneliness when words fail us. Elisa Shua Dusapin observes her characters with anthropological curiosity and great sensitivity. Her wisdom will astound you.” —Sanaë Lemoine, author of The Margot Affair 

"The spaces left unfilled are what give the text its otherworldly magic." —Grace Linden, LA Review of Books

“Evokes Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero.” —Michelle Kicherer, Willamette Weekly 

“Dusapin is a writer gifted in atmosphere; every image in this slim novel oozes with portent and symbolic weight….A delicate and elegant novel that asks what we owe the ones we love.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Quietly affecting… a beautiful rendering of unresolved adolescence” —Publishers Weekly

"Intriguing and surprising" –Bookpage

“A soulful look at the ties we cannot break no matter how hard we try.” —Booklist

Praise for Winter in Sokcho

"Mysterious, beguiling, and glowing with tender intelligence, Winter in Sokcho is a master class in tension and atmospherics, a study of the delicate, murky filaments of emotion that compose a life. Dusapin has a rare and ferocious gift for pinning the quick, slippery, liveness of feeling to the page: her talent is a thrill to behold." —Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

"Dusapin’s terse sentences are at times staggeringly beautiful, their immediacy sharply and precisely rendered from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins … Oiled with a brooding tension that never dissipates or resolves, Winter in Sokcho is a noirish cold sweat of a book." —The Guardian

“Letting the experience of the novel sit allowed for its subtle power to reveal itself to me. It’s a book that requires a particular kind of attention, a willingness to still and let the perspective of another move through you.” –Chicago Tribune

“Each of Dusapin’s novels is distinct, but united by her astonishing, borderline-generational talent for mood and atmosphere…. [H]er books are so unique in setting, and so precise in their emotional register, that they prove unforgettable…. The Old Fire is a masterpiece of restraint.” –Defector