A minor conspriacy

✓ kingstoken's 2026 Book Bingo: An Author's Debut/First Book

Oxford Soju Club by Jinwoo Park is a 2025 spy novel about six people forced to examine their loyalties and choices over the course of an eventful 24 hours or so in Oxford. Several of the principal characters have more than one moniker, but at a high level they include a North Korean spy, his mentor, their handler, a Korean-American spy, and the owner and cook at a Korean restaurant that finds itself the site of a post-assassination rendezvous.

The story starts with a bang, with the killing of a veteran spy who falls victim to the foreseen "clean-up" of a regime change, and while it very much keeps its forward momentum throughout, its focus is more on identity than espionage. It plays with the overlap between the tropes of being a spy and the experience of being an immigrant, drilling into what it means to be an individual, a citizen, a member of an ethnicity, or a member of a family.

I found this a highly satisfying and engaging read, and while I can see why it didn't make the Canada Reads shortlist this year (there being no connection to Canada in the book, only through the author), I'm very glad the longlist put this on my radar. This is a great debut, and I hope it's one of many novels for Park if he's so inclined.

( An Excerpt )

✓ kingstoken's 2026 Book Bingo: First Person POV

The Red Chesterfield by Wayne Arthurson is a 2019 crime novella (with a touch of magical realism) about a bylaw enforcement officer, M, who finds a body while investigating an abandoned chesterfield. The incident leaves M shaken and drawn into more than one mystery as the chesterfield keeps appearing and a regular on M's route disappears. But the book is less interested in answering "whodunnit" than it is with looking at characters' decisions about getting involved in crime and drama and how priorities around family, romantic relationships, career, community, truth and justice can shift the usual narrative shape of the genre.

This is one of those books that I want to take apart with a little eyeglass screwdriver to see how it works. It's an absolute marvel of efficiency. It's only 99 pages (that exact number being by design, I suspect) with large text and several half-page chapters, but it's packed with story. It covers a lot of ground without feeling like it's moving as fast as it is. We get to know so much about who M is as a person but from a deep enough position that we skip a lot of high-level markers or exposition. This story is built on implication and inference, and the reader's principally assigned to solving the protagonist rather than the plot.

I really enjoyed this one, and I'm looking forward to checking out the author's other work.

( An Excerpt )