A mother of two sits at home waiting for her husband to return — but he never does. This is the opening premise of Hannah Michell’s Excavations. In the Seoul-set novel, Sae, a woman in her early 30s, learns that the skyscraper where her engineer husband Jae works has collapsed. When he fails to come home, she fears the worst. So she launches her own investigation into his disappearance, putting herself at the heart of a years-long mystery that makes her question everything about the man she married and the life they built together.
This is Michell’s U.S. debut; her first novel The Defections was published in the U.K. in 2014. In addition to fiction writing, she works as a lecturer in UC Berkeley’s Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies program with a focus on Korean pop culture. Born in Yorkshire, Michell moved to South Korea when she was six months old and spent her formative years experiencing the country’s changing economic fortune and social landscape.
Excavations is not only set in Seoul, but imbued with the city’s history and spirit. “Seoul is a woman with a past who hides her scars under a garish dress,” one character muses in the book. And Michell uses Sae as a proxy to expose those scars.
The novel spans a period that parallels Michell’s own ’90s upbringing in South Korea, often with direct analogs to the era’s happenings — like a plot involving Sae and Jae’s involvement in an anti-government student protest movement. “Some of the more contemporary events in the book were at the edge of my awareness,” the author reflects. “I could hear the student protests that were happening, but I was only five, so I didn’t really understand what was at stake during that time. All through high school, I would be walking home through college campuses that were engulfed in tear gas.”
It was only after coming to Berkeley and studying Korean history more intentionally that Michell put the pieces together and came to understand the country she grew up in. She began to see the gaps between the narrative it created for itself and the dark shadows of its history. “There is this narrative of Korea as this very successful economic miracle because at the end of the Korean War, it was the second-poorest country in the world,” Michell says. “Today, it’s the 10th-largest economy. People only want to talk about it in terms of celebrating this miracle.”