The Old Woman With the Knife
Gu Byeong-mo
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A whip-smart, taut and compelling novel about a 60-something female assassin navigating the vulnerabilities posed by her ageing body, and a meditation on loss and loneliness
She never presumed she herself would live out her natural life, so she wouldn’t mind leaving this world through an untimely death.
Hornclaw is a sixty-five-year-old female contract killer who is considering retirement. But while on an assassination job for the ‘disease control’ company she works for, Hornclaw makes an uncharacteristic error, causing a sequence of events that brings her past well and truly into the present.
Threatened with sabotage by a young male upstart and battling new desires and urges when she least expects them, Hornclaw steels her resolve, demonstrating that no matter their age, the female of the species is always more deadly than the male.
“Assassination, Gangnam style. A resonant K-noir treat”
Luke Jennings, Author Of The Killing Eve Novels
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“Darkly comic … It focuses engagingly and compassionately on the invisibility of ageing citizens”
financial Times
“The pull of this novel lies in its incredible story, filled with fascinating, flawed, funny, heartbreaking characters. It’s the experience of reading it that will stay with you”
the Times
“I loved The Old Woman With the Knife, Gu Byeong-mo’s pitch-black comic thriller about an elderly female assassin”
Paula Hawkins
“Electrifying. An utterly thrilling, illuminating read with a radical heroine at its heart. I loved it”
Irenosen Okojie
Gu Byeong-mo
Gu Byeong-mo was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1976. She made her literary debut in 2009 when her novel Wizard Bakery won the second Changbi Prize for Young Adult Fiction. Her 2015 short-story collection Geugeosi namaneun anigireul received the Today’s Writer Award and Hwang Sun-won New Writers’ Award. This is her third novel, and the first to be translated into the English language.
Chi-Young Kim is an award-winning literary translator and editor based in Los Angeles. A recipient of the Man Asian Literary Prize (2011), she has translated works by You-jeong Jeong, Sun-mi Hwang, Young-ha Kim, Kyung Ran Jo, J.M. Lee and Kyung-sook Shin, among others.