Gill 7

The gills, the wounds that keep us alive as we desperately want to breathe

"Gills" is a beautiful, cruel fairy tale that depicts the sad fate of a boy who acquires gills on the brink of death.
A man, driven to the edge of life by a series of misfortunes, throws himself into a lake with his son in his arms in irreversible despair.
The man ultimately loses his life, but the child, who has gills thanks to his instinctive will to live, miraculously survives.
The child is found by an old man living by the lake and his grandson, Kang-ha, and is given the name 'Gon' and comes to live with them.
Gon, who breathes with gills and swims in the deep blue lake with dazzling scales.
The boy, who hides his identity and lives isolated from the world, feels boundless freedom only in the water.
Kang-ha, who gave Gon a new name and life, and Hae-ryu, who saved his life with Gon's help.
In the cursed waters of life, the story of those abandoned and alienated by the world, desperately wanting to breathe today and tomorrow, unfolds mysteriously and beautifully.

“If I fall into the water again, I won’t be lucky enough to meet the mermaid prince twice, so I’ll just keep waving my arms around.
What else can I do if I have to swim?
“Perhaps the world itself is bottomless water.”

A powerful struggle for life, a tribute to the dazzling living, breathing beings.

Author Koo Byeong-mo began his career with “Wizard Bakery,” which was widely acclaimed for expanding the horizons of Korean literature and received enthusiastic support from readers.
Since then, she has freely and without boundaries crossed between youth literature, serious literature, pure literature, and genre literature through her unique attempts, such as “Breakthrough,” which wrote a new female narrative through an elderly female killer character unprecedented in Korean literature; “I Hope It’s Not Just Me,” which tenaciously depicted the cruel portrait of us turning our backs on each other in our disastrous lives and won the Today’s Writer Award and the Hwang Sun-won New Writer’s Award; and “A Spoonful of Time,” which warmly depicted the joys and sorrows of humanity and the secrets of life as seen through the eyes of a robot.
With his provocative yet fantastical imagination, vividly alive and breathing characters, tenaciously solid and dense prose, and narratives that offer warm comfort and healing, he has firmly established a new axis in Korean literature.


Author Koo Byung-mo's masterpiece, "Gills," depicts a desperate reality in a fantastical and powerful way with astonishing appeal, a dense narrative, unique imagination, and a deeper sense of theme.
The story unfolds about a man who gained gills in a fierce struggle for life on the brink of death, and the secret yet heartbreaking fate of the people surrounding him.
Kang-ha, who gave Gon a new name and life, is worried about him out of a vague fear and jealousy that Gon might leave him someday, but he treats him roughly on the outside.
After abandoning her son Kang-ha and becoming addicted to drugs, In-yeong returns after more than a decade and feels longing and comfort from Gon.
Haeryu, who is tired of life, saves his life with Gon's help, and is drawn to his mystery and wonder as he pursues his secret.

Even though we may be abandoned and hurt by the world, we were all once dazzling living, breathing beings who swam freely in our own ocean.
Those wounds eventually become the gills that allow us to breathe, and even though it is bottomless water, we are beings who struggle fiercely towards life, waving our arms with all our might.
《Gills》 is a fascinating novel that breathes life into our weary daily lives.

Each and every sentence is written with devotion and sincerity, one by one.

This cover work was reinterpreted by designer Park Yeon-mi using the work of embroidery artist Lee Eun-jeong.
The beauty that blossomed with each drop of sweat and sincerity resembles the world of artist Koo Byung-mo's work, which he pushes forward with all his heart and soul, sentence by sentence.
Embroidery artist Eun-Jeong Lee creates a world by collecting life's most precious 'moments'.
The embroidery works, which depict the dream space and the dreaming space through fragments of the most shining moments, memories, time, and emotions in life, seem to reproduce the mysterious and fantastic world of Gu Byeong-mo.
The cover captures the happiest moments of the novel's main characters, those shining and beautiful moments, and features the image of Gon swimming in the deep blue lake, his dazzling scales sparkling, feeling boundless freedom.
I hope that the time spent reading this book will provide readers with a sense of rest and comfort, as if they were breathing deeply and comfortably in their own hideaway.