A Twist of Fate A Novel

Two women meet on a train. Each is running from a deadly secret. When one disappears, the other decides to take her place—for better, or for worse.

Jae-young has just left everything she’s ever known, not that it was much. Her thankless job, her infested apartment, her abusive boyfriend—who happens to be dead on the kitchen floor. Murder was never the way she envisioned leaving, but it was desperate times. Now, escaping her transgressions on a train to the bustling city of Seoul, Jae-young is just hoping to become invisible—safe.

On the train she meets a chatty mother with her infant son who seem to be running from a similarly harsh life with her unfaithful husband, hoping to find refuge with the in-laws she’s never met. To avoid further conversation, Jae-young excuses herself for a moment. When she returns, the woman is nowhere to be found, but her crying child remains with a note, pleading with Jae-young to take him to his grandparents in a remote province far from Seoul.

It’s not an ideal pitstop, but for the sake of the child she can’t ignore the request. When Jae-young arrives, the house takes her by surprise. It's a gated manor oozing with opulence and the finest luxuries. Having never met their grandchild or daughter-in-law before, the family assumes Jae-young is the boy’s mother and ushers her in. Then Jae-young realizes: There’s nothing more invisible than becoming someone else.

But both women have ghosts in their pasts. Jae-young may have no idea what lies rotten under the shiny veneer of her new life, but there's nothing she won't do to make sure she never goes back.

Se-Ah Jang has worked as a marketer for a luxury brand and is now running a book review channel, Love-or-Hate Prescriptions for Readers. She writes under multiple pseudonyms and covers a variety of genres, from web novels to fashion photo books. A Twist of Fate is her first full-length novel under this name, and was selected as a book-to-film project by South Korea's biggest bookstore, Kyobo. It was optioned for film only weeks after publication.

S. L. Park is the translator of If You’re Going to Live to One Hundred, You Might As Well Be Happy by Rhee Kun Hoo. She wrote under her full name one poetry colection and a forthcoming chapbook, and has won for her fiction Indiana Review Fiction Prize and received a fiction prize from Writer’s Digest. Born and raised in South Korea, she holds a BA in English from NYU and an MFA in poetry from the University of Texas at Austin. Her translations of Korean literature have appeared or are forthcoming in the Cincinnati Review, the Los Angeles Review, and New England Review, among others.