Skull Water A Novel Heinz Insu Fenkl by Heinz Insu Fenkl 9781954118195, 1954118198 instant download after payment.

PEN/Hemingway Award finalist  
Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection  

     Set in South Korea in the 1950s & 1970s, a haunting inter-generational coming-of-age novel about identity & displacement. Skull Water is a coming-of-age story set in South Korea about Insu, the son of a Korean mother & a GI father in the U.S. Army, & the intertwined tale of his Korean Big Uncle, who has been exiled to a mountain cave near the family village to die from a gangrenous foot. Growing up near the army base in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Insu & his two best friends, also "half & halfs," spend their days skipping school, selling scavenged Western goods on the black market, & testing the boundaries between childhood & adulthood. When Insu hears an old wives' tale that water collected from a dead person's skull will cure any sickness, he vows to collect some in order to heal Big Uncle's mysterious injury--a quest that takes him & his friends on a sprawling journey into some of South Korea's darkest corners.  
     Meanwhile, Big Uncle, a geomancer who was uprooted by the Korean War, has embraced his solitude & fate and attempts to teach his nephew that life is not limited to what we can see or what we think we know. As Insu becomes increasingly drawn to his family lore, Korean folktales, & Buddhist spiritual teachings, South Korea itself is changing--rapidly transforming into a more modern Western country. In this sweeping tale of displacement & identity, Skull Water explores questions surrounding family, loyalty, & history, & the ways in which our past continues to haunt our present.  
     Heinz Insu Fenkl was born in 1960 in Bupyeong, Korea, & grew up in Korea, Germany, & the United States. Heis the translator of the classic seventeenth-century Korean Buddhist novel The Nine Cloud D