Hello, Goodbye (안녕이라 그랬어) is Kim Ae-ran's first short story collection in eight years, with seven stories. Published in Korea in 2025, it hit the bestseller lists of the three major bookstores, Kyobo, Yes24 and Aladin, and was repeatedly voted novel of the year by Korean writers. The Traditional Chinese edition in Taiwan was translated by Chien Yu-hsuan and published by Thinkingdom.

The title comes from the Korean word “안녕”: the same word means “hello” when you meet and “goodbye” when you part. The whole book swings between these two meanings—writing about the meetings and partings of people today with strangers, neighbors and family.

Three threads running through the book

• Space: each story takes place in a concrete space—someone else's mansion, a rented home, a holiday cabin abroad, a bookstore of one's own. Space isn't just backdrop; it reflects the characters' circumstances.
• Money and neighbors: the critic Shin Hyung-cheol sums up the book as “treat your neighbor as you treat your money,” pointing out that the characters are economic beings living under neoliberalism, constantly torn between their values and their economic behavior.
• Loss: unemployment, breakups, the death of loved ones, being swindled out of savings—the characters all face problems that can't be easily solved.

• “HOME PARTY” (2022 Kim Seung-ok Literary Award): Yi-yeon, a stage actor who lost her work during the pandemic, is invited to an upper-class family's party. She watches the whole scene with an actor's eye for people, and her final line silences the room.
• “Good Neighbors” (2022 Oh Young-su Literary Award): a reading tutor, under pressure from moving and debt, discovers that the student she has always pitied is actually well-off, exposing the sense of superiority hidden beneath her pity.
• “The Cabin in the Woods”: an unemployed woman who has lied to her family about being laid off travels abroad to clear her head, meets a housekeeper who cares only about tips and cleans carelessly, and finally tries to connect with her through a handwritten note.
• “Foreign Body”: a man has an unspeakable discomfort stuck in his throat; this physical feeling ties into his situation at work and the old memories he scrolls through on social media.
• “Lemon Cake”: a former office worker who opened an independent bookstore struggles between her dream and survival.
• “Like Raindrops”: a person who has lived diligently loses the life they worked so hard to build because of an unexpected scam.
• “Hello, Goodbye” (title story): the heroine takes English conversation lessons on an online platform and connects with her foreign teacher because both have lost a parent; a song lyric she mishears becomes the key to the story.

Kim Ae-ran's prose is known for being precise and restrained. She doesn't preach; she tucks social criticism into everyday family and social scenes, letting readers feel the characters' situations through the details.

Critics note a recurring sense of humiliation in the book: seeing moral failure but lacking the power to resist it. At the same time, the author doesn't leave her characters stuck in suffering, but asks: to keep living, to face the life that goes on, what can we actually do?

Her editor also notes that compared with her earlier work, the change in this book is that it not only depicts life's hardships but also pays attention to how characters use what they have (such as the actor's years of stage craft in “HOME PARTY”) to form unexpected connections with others in difficult times.

• How someone treats their neighbors often reflects how they treat money.
• Pity and superiority are sometimes only a hair's breadth apart.
• Misunderstandings in language and imperfect communication can actually bring people closer.
• “안녕” isn't just hello or goodbye; it's also a wish for the other person to be well.

Korean critics say Kim Ae-ran's fiction offers the comfort of “so it's not just me”: caring for sick family members, anxiety about housing prices, the gap between city and countryside, awkward moments at work—things many people are living through but rarely put into words.

They also note that the book practices something difficult—putting yourself in someone else's place—so that before readers pass judgment, they first think, “Maybe it really could be like that.”