''The Interpreter'' is a 2003 murder mystery novel by

Suki Kim Suki Kim is a Korean American journalist and writer. She is the author of two books: the award-winning novel ''The Interpreter'' and a book of investigative journalism, ''Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's E ...

. A twenty-nine-year-old

Korean American Korean Americans are Americans of Korean ancestry (mostly from South Korea). In 2015, the Korean-American community constituted about 0.56% of the United States population, or about 1.82 million people, and was the fifth-largest Asian American ...

court interpreter, Suzy Park, is startled to discover during a case that her parents' homicide was not random.

Summary

Korean American Suzy Park works as a

court interpreter Interpreting is a translational activity in which one produces a first and final target-language output on the basis of a one-time exposure to an expression in a source language. The most common two modes of interpreting are simultaneous interp ...

for the

New York City courts The New York City court system consists of the several citywide and state courts. Courts There are two city courts, the Criminal Court and the Civil Court, and several state courts, the Supreme Court, Surrogate's Court, and Family Court. Unlike t ...

. She has had two rocky relationships with married men, worked a series of unsatisfying jobs, and cut ties with her family before her parents were shot in an unsolved double murder. During a court case, she discovers that her parents were not murdered by random violence, as the police had indicated, but instead had been shot by political enemies. The discovery motivates Park to investigate what really happened.

Awards and nomination

PEN/Beyond Margins Award PEN/Open Book (known as the Beyond Margins Award through 2009) is a program intended to foster racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities, and works to establish access for diverse literary groups to the publishing i ...

* Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award * Runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Prize

Translations

*Dutch: *French: *Korean: *Japanese:

Sources

Interview: Suki Kim and the Interpreter

Summary

Awards and nomination

Translations

Sources

Further reading