Snow Hunters

1954. At the end of the Korean War and after leaving the prison camps established by the Americans, Yohan, a young soldier from the North, is offered, like thousands of his unfortunate comrades, the opportunity to emigrate. He chooses Brazil, of which he knows nothing and does not speak the language, and settles, under an agreement with the United Nations, in a village on the coast where he finds work. Although a stranger in this land, Yohan finds a father in the person of his employer, Kiyoshi, a Japanese tailor established there since the end of the Second World War, then a family with Peixe, the son of fishermen who became the caretaker of the local church, and two young orphans. But building a present doesn't erase a painful past, and Yohan will have to fight to banish the demons that haunt him...

Like Alessandro Baricco in Silk, Paul Yoon, the author of Autrefois le rivage, captures the essence of life and its beauty in the resilience of a being who survives horror and reinvents himself.