This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2026.
If you’re a book lover, you will be well acquainted with the magical power of bookstores to soothe the stressful soul, to calm the rapidly beating heart and to make you feel like all the things that are ailing you, and in this frantic, digital world of ours, they can multitudinous, noisily insistent and peace of mind damning, are small, insignificant nothings.
In the often stressed out world of this reviewer, walking into a bookstore immediately lowers the tension and slows the pulse, the very act of seeing row upon row of books, some of which could soon be yours, immediately making me feel better.
That’s often not the intent of all bookstores; they are, after all, they are primarily to sell books and fair enough – we need them to do that, do that well and keep doing that for as long as possible.
But in Soyangri Book Kitchen by Kim Jee Hey (translated by Shanna Tan), the bookstore, which comes complete with guest rooms and a cafe and a range of activities from writing postcards to yourself, to be sent, along with a chosen book, to you at some future date to communal meals where everyone is welcome, is intentionally a place of rich, intimate community where sharing your soul is part of the deal and you can take a much-needed breath and reacquaint yourself with you after a busy world has left you divided, unhappy and distracted.
Guests are able to stay for as long or as little time as they need, and at every point, they will find the Soyangri Book Kitchen team, led by owner and corporate world refugee, Yoojin, there to hold their hands, listen, recommend the right book and become the found family they didn’t know they needed.
‘Whenever I find myself getting upset or angry, I reach for a book that allows me to immerse fully in another world – maybe like a crime or fantasy novel. They’re my painkillers. In those moments I’m absorbed in the book, I can forget the pain of reality.‘ [Yoojin]
Set in a small quiet village from the madding crowd of Seoul, South Korea, the Soyangri Book Kitchen has been created by Yoojin for people as weary of the world as herself.
A calm and gentle soul, Yoojin has bravely taken a step away from the hustle and bustle of South Korea’s modern economic miracle, which like many other advance economies, demands a pound of flesh and then some from those who toil within its energetic heart, and sunk the money earned from her start-up, now sold, into a venture that is far more in keeping with what she values most.
She loves books, community, good food (created by the irrepressibly upbeat Siwoo) and taking lost and weary souls, punch drunk from doing too much in too little time with no clear purpose or respite, and providing them with a sanctuary where they can stop and catch their breath.
Some, like team member, Serin, find that it’s a place they want to work in too, while others, such as the seven people who fill the pages of Soyangri Book Kitchen with their stories which Kim Jee Hey recounts with thoughtful intimacy and a heartwarming empathy.
The author herself is an escapee from the South Korean rat race, having traded in a career in journalism and broadcasting for running an independent bookshop of her own, and you can tell on every page and in every nuanced word that she has poured much of herself into this beautiful book.
As someone who has just taken eight weeks leave from his intense content-writing job to try and recover, at least in part, from five years of frantic, nasty, unending stress, during which up very much become down and any sense of self ended up scrambled, messy and uncertain, the idea of somewhere like the Soyangri Book Kitchen is an intoxicating one.
Through the seven people featured in the book, all of whom become, to some degree or another, part of the Soyangri Book Kitchen family, we come to understand why we need to jump off the treadmill, take some time to find ourselves again and to do it in a place like a bookstore where you can stay over night or for a month and do nothing but think or read or write or just talk.
People like popstar Da-in, known professionally as Diane, who is spectacularly successful, a music artist so successful that people embrace her as one of their own and take, take, take from her without thinking that perhaps there is an ailing person behind the glamorous, musically pleasing facade, or super successful lawyer Sohee who is staring down the barrel of a life-changing medical diagnosis need, though they don’t know it at the time, a place like the Soyangri Book Kitchen to lick the wounds they didn’t know they had and rediscover how wonderful life can be.
Another visitor is Soohyuk, a musical director who comes from a privileged family and who has a good heart and a thoughtful soul but who has found himself convinced that being alive may not be something he can countenance any more.
The stories in Soyangri Book Kitchen are serious ones, and while the novel has a gently calming and caring soul to it, it doesn’t stint on being brutally honest on the hugely exacting, life-sapping toll life can take on you.
It knows the world can be brutal and it’s honest about it, but the proposes, beautifully and with real heart, that somewhere like the Soyangri Book Kitchen is what can heal that which ails you.
‘It’s as the name suggests. A kitchen of books to fill the emptiness of the heart, just like food fills our stomach. There’re many others who remind me of the old me – burned out but unaware. I hope that they’ll be able to fill their starving hearts with stories. Even better if they can learn to write about their feelings.’
Books and kinds are at the heart of the stories in Soyangri Book Kitchen and you will find yourself similarly touched and transformed as you read about people no that dissimilar to yourself who have, for quite commendable reasons, lost whey they are and what matters to them in life.
The transformations are quietly powerful rather than boisterously dramatic which fits the place in which they take place.
What is most striking about Soyangri Book Kitchen is that, while it feels magically and happily removed from the world around it, at least while its guests are there, it is also very much grounded in the real world, reassuming tired and weary souls, like this reviewer, that the sort of change the author recounts are entirely possible in real life too.
Reading this gorgeously lovely book is to find a place like the bookstore itself where you can sit back, look at you’ve become and what you’d like to be, and glory in all the quietly transformative change that is possible.
Maybe you will walk away from your old life, maybe you won’t but what you, and those in the book will find, is a new life where mindfulness, insight and books guide you to a new life, a new place of healthy perspective and healing, and where you can point to the Soyangri Book Kitchen as the book and the place that starts it all, changing your life, your world and your outlook for the better.