A Love Story from the End of the World: Stories

by Juhea Kim

Overview

From the acclaimed author of Beasts of a Little Land and City of Night Birds, an exquisite, globetrotting story collection about humans in precarious balance with the natural world

Spanning multiple locales and epochs, and rendered in fine detail and vivid color, this transportive collection shows what it means to live as human inhabitants on our one miraculous planet. Lyrical, at times hilarious, and always heartfelt, each of these ten stories is a reflection of individual choice in the face of man-made apocalypse: in a near-future Seoul, where air pollution has become so fatal that the city has been encased in a translucent biodome, a civil engineer charged with its upkeep contemplates an arranged marriage. A painter, disenchanted with New York City, travels to the South of France and falls into a dalliance with an entrepreneur who claims to have invented a new color. And on an island where the Indian and Pacific Oceans meet, upon which other countries have relegated their waste to form a mountain of landfill, a local boy facing daily privation gets internet famous for his K-pop-inspired dances. 

With the clear-eyed reverence of Richard Powers and the sparkling sincerity of George Saunders, Juhea Kim’s first story collection views our broken world—and broken hearts—from breathtaking heights. A Love Story from the End of the World delivers an impassioned reminder that we are human—but without nature, we are nothing at all.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063446397
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	11/25/2025
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Juhea Kim is the author of the novel Beasts of a Little Land, which was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the winner of the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award, Russia’s largest annual award in literature. It has been translated around the world and is being adapted for television. She is also the author of City of Night Birds, which was a Reese’s Book Club pick. A graduate of Princeton University, her writing has been published in Granta, the Times Literary Supplement, the Independent, Zyzzyva, Guernica, and other outlets. She is an advocate for wildlife conservation, animal rights, and education and aid in Africa. Born in Korea and raised in Portland, Oregon, Kim now lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

"Lush and evocative, Juhea Kim's A Love Story from the End of the World is like a precision cut diamond that fractures light into a spectrum of possible futures on this, our wounded planet . . . Despite flights of imagination, Kim's stories ultimately tether us to the earth and demand that we give it our attention. This is an exquisite and essential collection." —Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, author of What We Fed to the Manticore — Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, author of What We Fed to the Manticore

"In A Love Story from the End of the World, Juhea Kim offers both an unsettling glimpse at what climate change might mean for our planet, and a vision of the transcendent moments of beauty and human connection that make it possible to survive in a changing world."  — Ash Davidson, author of Damnation Spring

From the Publisher