If you’re a fan of Korean translations, you might recognise the name Anton Hur, belonging to the translator of the bestselling therapy memoir, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki and the International Booker-shortlisted story collection Cursed Bunny. He’s also the translator of several books by one of my favourite authors, Kyung-sook Shin, and I always look forward to any project he’s attached to. Naturally, news of his own debut novel caught my attention straightaway.

In the near-future world of Toward Eternity, ‘nanotherapy’ – the replacement of the body’s cells with android nanites – has been devised as a cure for cancer. One of the world’s first recipients of the treatment, Yonghun is now cancer-free and essentially immortal, eventually outliving his husband. In his grief, Younghun creates a living, thinking AI called Panit, teaching it how to understand and appreciate poetry. Panit’s consciousness is soon transferred into an android body and the development and consequences of this technology are chronicled through different perspectives over hundreds of years. It’s an ambitious undertaking that Hur pulls off spectacularly.

In an age where developments in AI are rapidly changing the way we live and the way we work, Hur seems to weigh-in on the ‘can AI replace writers and artists?’ debate: ‘The intelligence is in the appreciation of poetry, surely. Even more so than in generating it.’ His ideas about what it means to exist as a human being in our increasingly volatile society, and his assertion of the constant reinvention and metamorphosis of the self through language and art, feels tied to his experience as a translator and now author, as a mediator of life, language and stories. Toward Eternity is an intelligent, thought-provoking, and philosophical book for our times, one that remains hopeful that even at the end of the world and humanity as we know it, love always finds some way to exist.