This novel is set in Gwangju, South Korea, in May 1980, when a popular uprising was crushed by the military. It begins with a teenage boy helping to tend the dead in a makeshift gathering place, and then moves through the voices of others touched by those days, across the following decades. Each section shows how violence lingers in memory, in families and in the body. The book is sober and tender, and it matters as a work of witness that gives human faces to a historical event.