After telling us about his rough childhood, but delighted with his grandparents in his bestseller I want to go to this island (L'Asiathèque, 2013), Lim Chul-woo evokes his childhood, both hard and happy, with his grandparents on the island of Wando, South Korea, then tells of his adolescence and his poorly lived move in a poor suburb of Kwanju, on the mainland. His mother struggling to make them live, he and his two sisters, one of whom is mentally handicapped.
In The lighthouse, Lim Chul-woo plunges us into the intimacy of poor Koreans, on the sidelines of the city, without makeup or misery.
