Book Review - A Love Story from the End of the World
Written between 2015 and 2024, South Korea-born author Juhea Kim’s 10-story collection A Love Story from the End of the World is a resonant addition to the expanding field of climate and eco fiction. In an author’s note, Kim writes that “art is the humanity of the artist” and that “what heals or endangers humanity should be the concern of every artist”.
The 38-year-old, who was raised in Oregon and is based in London, has aligned her literary career with environmental activism and grassroots campaigns by channelling her royalties into specific causes.
Her debut novel Beasts of a Little Land (2022), set in early 20th-century Japanese-occupied Korea, won the 2024 Yasnaya Polyana Award, and she donated the prize money to the conservation of Siberian tigers and Amur leopards. Her second, City of Night Birds (2025), a portrait of ruthless ambition in the ballet world, supported Catholic humanitarian organisation Caritas Somalia, while her latest book will benefit animal rescue non-profits.
In her more dystopian tales, Kim imagines how ecological catastrophe might shape our futures. In “Biodome”, freedom of choice is a central theme. Set in a near-future Seoul, a translucent dome encloses the city, ravaged by toxic sandstorms from China.
The dust is “laced with heavy metals and pesticides remained in the atmosphere so that every breath one took, inside or outside, could cause disease — asthma, interminable coughs, rashes, cancers, and blindness”. Park, the senior engineer monitoring the dome, ponders a world he has never known and finds himself “wakened to a new consciousness”.
The fictions span continents. One of the most affecting, “Mountain, Island”, illustrates how individual actions impact poorer communities. The story interweaves dual narratives: introducing the global success of a K-pop band, before transporting us to a small atoll where the Indian and Pacific Oceans converge, transformed into a giant landfill, the dumping ground for other countries’ waste. When the island briefly opens to poverty tourism, Heru, a young boy, discovers that his imitation of the K-pop idols may be his salvation.
Kim’s prose often shifts between stark reportage of environmental damage and more lyrical passages. “Older Sister”, set in California, meditates on the personal and the political, covering the 1992 riots that followed the acquittal of police officers in the Rodney King case and, years later, the wildfires in Los Angeles.
The narrator recalls the childhood pleasure of thinking she had seen a ghost with her now-estranged sister — a memory that underscores how inner isolation can precipitate wider dislocation: “what is life but a series of ghosts we face alone, with no one to tell who would understand?”
Throughout the collection, fleeting connections offer glimmers of hope, with love a recurring theme. Kim has said she wants her fiction to encourage readers to recognise both their responsibility and their capacity to effect change.
In the title story, which plays on its double meaning, Kim’s dialogue brilliantly evokes the differing viewpoints of three scientists. Bada, a Korean research scientist working with a Norwegian team on Arctic carbon sinks, befriends a polar bear cub abandoned by its mother in her search for ice. Orphaned herself and raised in Idaho by a white family, Bada mourns the mother she never knew. Aware her actions could prove harmful, she is thrilled when “the cub — whom she named Hayang, meaning ‘white’ in Korean — seemed to thrive”.
Kim’s scenarios are imaginative though not all the stories land. “Bioark”, a futuristic take on Noah’s ark, feels thinly sketched. Yet her fiction offers a powerful reminder of what we stand to lose; that we are part of nature; and “we have within ourselves everything we need to save humanity”.
Originally published by the Financial Times