A hot topic bestseller that readers are crazy about
100,000 copies sold commemorative edition published!

Recommended by Kang Full, Lee Jun-ik, and Jang Kang-myeong

The journey to the time you most want to return to has begun!
The first full-length novel by director Kim Young-tak, the author of the films "Hello Ghost" and "Slow Video."

To celebrate the sale of 100,000 copies of director Kim Young-tak's first full-length novel, "Gomtang," which opened a new horizon for Korean science fiction literature, Arte is releasing a special edition.
Director Kim Young-tak won the Best New Director Award at the Baeksang Arts Awards in 2011 for the film “Hello Ghost,” and was nominated for the Best Screenplay and Best New Director awards at the Grand Bell Awards and the Best New Director award at the Blue Dragon Film Awards, demonstrating his outstanding talents in both screenwriting and directing from his debut work.
He is also a true storyteller who has received much love up to his second work, "Slow Video," and has proven his outstanding imagination that unfolds in familiar daily life and his innate narrative ability that makes it impossible to put down once you start watching.

Director Kim Young-tak's writing of his first full-length novel, "Gomtang," which was "a comma-like forty days given to myself in the year I turned forty," cannot but be a fateful event.
This work, which began serialization on Kakao Page, became a hot topic that garnered 500,000 readers, and the book version published by Arte in 2018 became a bestseller with its original concept that crosses genres, mystery filled with a warm longing, and dense structure that is easy to read, and has been loved by 100,000 readers to date.

The 『Gomtang 100,000 Copies Sales Commemorative Edition』 is published simultaneously with the new work 『Youngsu and 0su』, which is being released after 7 years, and has been reborn with a sensational design through the illustrations of artist Kwon Seo-young, who expresses the narrative that crosses the past and future with science fiction imagination and colorful colors.
『Gomtang』, which received rave reviews from readers as "a mysterious and powerful novel that you can't put down once you pick it up," has become a truly authentic work boasting an even deeper flavor after seven years, just like gomtang that needs to be simmered for a long time over low heat to bring out its true flavor.
"Gomtang," a time-slip SF mystery that combines the thrilling suspense of a time-slip SF mystery with a yearning for family, delivers a heartwarming experience. Now is the time to savor it the most.

“Hey! You’re talking about time travel. No one has ever gone there and come back.
They say we're all going to die.
Why would only people like us who don't have the money go on such a nice trip?
Why would only those who need money go?
“It’s because it’s dangerous, because it’s incredibly dangerous.”
--- p.16

Seo Yu-heon opened the dead man's head.
And then they took out a small chip inside the brain.
It was a small chip about 4 millimeters wide.
Seo Yu-heon and Tak Seong-jin both looked at each other with nervous expressions.
Tak Seong-jin spoke first.
“What kind of case would it be to put something like this into the brain?”
--- p.61

It was 2019 here, and the present where Woo-hwan lives was 2063.
The compatibility was forty-four.
Then it means you will be born next year.
That way the calculations were correct.
I don't know Lee Soon-hee well, but she seemed like a high school student.
It didn't make sense to Woo-Hwan's head.
It didn't make sense, and it shouldn't have happened that way.
A kid who is still a student, and who has been arrested by the police and has not been able to come home for days, and wears a bloody school uniform, can't possibly become someone's father, right?

--- p.77

As hope is evident, so is despair.
Anyone who saw the opportunity would have recommended that trip.
It's the same as asking, "Even if I die, it's okay, right? I don't really have the will to live, do I?"

--- p.159

A man in his 30s was walking out of the sea.
He was the first and only person from the future.
Park Jong-dae hoped that no one would know that fact.
Park Jong-dae had no intention of going back.
I was thinking of inserting a new life into this present, this gap in time.

--- p.205

'Kill the person who killed the twelve.'
Twelve people died at once.
If anyone had killed them, it was the one the old man had spoken of.
He was the person Hwayoung had to find.

--- pp.292-293