The premise of this, i.e. communal living, was what really drew me to this novel. I appreciated a lot of the commentary on freelance work and its difficulties as well as those on concentration issues. It was a good, somewhat dystopian exploration of a number of issues (low birthrate, communal living, motherhood and the patriarchy) that face both contemporary South Korea and many other societies across the globe. For example, where I am based in The Netherlands there has been a lot of recent interest in developing communal living facilities.
Whilst the translation has a nice flow to it, aspects of the writing, particularly the dialogue, felt a little stilted. I think part of this derives from the extent to which the novel tells rather than shows and I was left wondering that maybe if it hadn’t been a third-person narrative, the exploration of what really is an interesting premise, might have been much more engaging.

Your Neighbour’s Table is a quiet yet powerful novel about four women living in a government-run apartment complex near Seoul. The community promises support and affordable housing—but only if families agree to have more children. What seems like a fresh start soon reveals hidden tensions, as the women face judgment, pressure, and the emotional weight of motherhood.
The story explores how societal expectations shape women’s lives, especially around parenting and work. It’s not a loud or dramatic book, but its honesty lingers. The characters feel real, and their struggles are deeply relatable.

If you enjoy thoughtful stories about community, gender roles, and quiet resistance, this one is worth your time.

An intriguing premise for a story and at times this probing social experiment hit the mark, but for me there was a disconnect with the translation that had me skimming until I reached the end.

"Your Neighbour's Table" feels dystopian and current at the same time. Personally, I love to discover social uneasiness in other parts of the world through literally fiction, as some collective moods often inspire writing. Gu Byeong-mo created a claustrophobic world of a community project that aims to increase childbirth by giving people a nicely subsidised place to live and promising shared childcare. Yet, the requirement is to gave at least 3 children per couple.

As it. turns out, the seemingly idyllic world doesn't solve a problem of stereotypical gender roles and how burdensome they may be.

Gu Byeong-mo’s Your Neighbour's Table, translated by Chi-Young Kim, is a chilling yet understated examination of modern South Korean society, wrapped in the intimate struggles of four families living in a government-run experimental housing complex. The Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments, designed to counteract the country’s plunging birthrate, provide an eerie setting where societal pressure, gender roles, and economic instability collide.

Through the eyes of women like Yojin, a mother juggling work and an unsatisfying marriage, and Danhui, a controlling yet deeply insecure matriarch, the novel exposes the quiet oppression embedded in everyday interactions. The rigid expectations of motherhood, financial dependence, and societal conformity are laid bare, forcing characters into uncomfortable compromises. The novel’s greatest strength lies in its ability to depict the mental gymnastics women perform to justify their realities—how they gaslight themselves into submission, silence, or numbness in order to maintain harmony.

Gu’s writing is sharp and immersive, drawing readers into a world that feels both deeply familiar and uncomfortably dystopian. While the lack of chapter titles can make navigating perspectives a challenge, the novel’s relentless tension and thought-provoking themes make it a gripping read. With a hauntingly cyclical conclusion, Your Neighbour's Table leaves readers contemplating the suffocating nature of societal expectations long after the last page.

This was such an interesting read and showed the pressures on women to have children and be the ‘perfect’ mother and wife. The communal aspect was also interesting. While the women in this all felt individual the men were quite honestly interchangeable and I got lost at which woman they were married to.

Although I did enjoy I did find the writing quite dry which I think could have been possibly down to the translation into English.

It is a very beautifully written social story that explores womanhood, motherhood, social pressures and norms and misogyny. It was rather relevant to the current environment. However, I wanted more connections with this story's main characters, which I felt was missing. Also, the book wanted to delve into so many different social issues, it really fell flat at the end rather than exploring all those issues in depth. I felt that the commentary scraped the surface but didn't go deep enough.

The book itself follows four families who move into a Dream Future Communal Appartments, a pilot social experiment funded by the government to bring the declining country's population and birth rate up. The four families do start to build a community but as the story progresses, the meaning of community and community itself means different things to those different couples as they face not only shared challenges but also individual ones.

What I really enjoyed is that it was told through the women's perspective, how they are seen growing up, how they are pressured to marry and have children, how they need to be good mums and do everything for the family, whilst all the accolades usually go to the males. That exploration of social norms, pressures and misogyny really interested me.

I wish however, there was more commentary behind the pilot social experiment of the communal apartments, This part of the story wasn't as deeply covered. I also was a bit taken aback by the ending of the book too. Maybe by making the book 100 pages longer the author would have been able to not only explore other social issues mentioned in depth but also to develop the main characters and even gain the males perspective on the said social issues and the communal apartment experiment.

Overall: It was very well written and different kind of story, which I enjoyed reading.

Your Neighbour's Table is a quiet novel about family, and the ever growing issue of a declining population. It's told through the lives of four women, each with their own problems,but which all seem to centre around them being women. It's a claustrophobic read at times, very closed in and centered around this apartment block. The women feel isolated yet also stangely united as they all share the same problems. I do think it was a little shirt to try and convey the meesage the author was going for. The characters feel under developed as the reader doesn't get to spend long with them before moving on. I would have liked to have seen more backstory to try and flesh out thr thoughts and feelings of these characters.

A thought provoking but ultimately shirt read that I'm not sure will leave much of an impression.

A couple moved into an apartment built by the government, which will be filled with other families, as they are "forced" to live communally while raising their children together. The promise of the place was too good to be thrown aside, you simply need to have three children (this is due to the birth rate in Korea that is relatively low) so here they are, four families trying to coexist in this new place they call home.
I find the discussion revolving motherhood intriguing and I get this sense of foreboding throughout the book, though I have to say it lacked of something to make it outstanding.

A provocative, poetic tale with beautiful storytelling that paints an uncomfortably real picture of the pressures of womanhood, motherhood and the misogyny woven into the fabric of our society.

In a bizarre social experiment that offers a better life in return for having more children, we’re left to think about what we’d do - could we be pushed to allow such control over us if they promised enough? What would it take for us to agree to something like this? And what more would happen if we start. What are we willing to compromise for an acceptable life? But ultimately, it’s a story about modern life and the stress we can find in trying to do what’s expected of us.

As we move through the story, words like 'community' start to lose their meaning and become sinister - full of expectation and pressure instead of warmth and support. It balances this promise of a perfect community with the impossibility of a modern capitalist world.

We hear from four women living with their husbands and children in the commune - settling in, creating relationship, dealing with their own marriages and problems as we move from odd domestic scene to another. Everything seems to normal but just slightly off and it keeps you fully on edge the whole time in a quiet, simmering kind of intensity - one that leaves you feeling slightly anticlimactic when you first close the book but then suddenly all fits into place.

I'm missing something from this book. It seemed to be missing a plot for a good portion of the story, instead making social commentary with its characters with little to attach us to the characters. The writing is brilliant and brings up some important points about womanhood and being a mother but as a novel, there is very little here.

Rather confusingly published as 'Apartment Women' in the US (why do publishers do this?), this is an interesting social novel about family, social expectations and motherhood. Welcome to the Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments, where residents are expected to have at least a certain number of children during their time there, and where community can be equally overpowering and supportive. I came to this without really knowing what to expect, and whilst it certainly is an interesting novel about society and motherhood, it just didn't fully engage. The characters felt a little too distant, so I couldn't actually really get involved in their stories. Worthy and interesting, but a little flat for me. Was it the translation? Maybe. I just can't put my finger on why this just didn't connect.

Somewhere between 3 and 3.5 stars.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

Your Neighbors Table is a story about 4 families, who take up the offer to move into a government funded apartment complex on the condition that they have 3 children to boost the countries population.

There were some really interesting themes in here, particularly around the reasons why people choose not to have children, or to only have one, the economic pressures of society and communal living. However, for me this book didn't work. I found it very difficult to connect with the characters, and I think that is because there were 4 women, their families and a very small number of pages. I also found that it came accross as reasons why women aren't good at child rearing any more, which I think was the opposite of the authors intent, but still felt like a dig at modern women.

I also found the ending very unsatisafactory, it felt like no issues raised were ever dealt with (which perhaps mirrors life), and so the abrupt conclusion left me feeling like there was too much left unsaid and unexplored.

Your Neighbours Table is a novel that could also be read as a social commentary on the low birth rate condition in South Korea, and the complex relationships of a community and family. The story follows Yojin and her family as they move into a communal living space established by the government to tackle the low birth rates in South Korea, where they are able to live on the condition she has two more children. However, the focus strays away from Yojin as Gu often switches between the multiple families that live within this communal building in order to develop the narrative further.

Gu has created very raw and real characters within this communal space, which is a highlight of the novel. All of the families are faced with their own challenges, including expectations of motherhood and loss of independence ‘despite all your maternal love and inner strength, you’d still find yourself marooned from time to time, and you had no choice but to continue on until your last breath’, and ‘despite the fact that having children had derailed their lives and shunted their individuality and desire to the periphery’, strikingly capturing the strain of motherhood, and the need to maintain a façade for everyone else.

The women’s perspectives are prioritised, with a feminist undertone, Your Neighbours Table references the harassment young Korean women face during their working years ‘she’d worked so many part-time and temp jobs from a young age and had been touched inappropriately at all of them’, but also their view of men when at home: ‘don’t think of a man as a human being. Think of him as an animal that understands what to do only when you order him to do it, every single time … even I think that a man is like a child or a dog.’

As with a lot of Korean and Japanese literary fiction, there are no major plot points or dynamic storylines, it is an exploration into human behaviour and development. It is reasonably paced and as more time is spent with each character, the reader becomes more engaged and curious about how these characters will change. Furthermore, Gu manages to keep the reader guessing as to how the diverse relationships are going to intercept. One trigger warning would be that there is a case of domestic violence that escalates to physical harm, though, this is not a significant or lengthy storyline.

There is an imbalance of character development, with several of the couples being developed with more attention than others, which as a novel that leans more towards character than story, is a short-fall for Gu, especially when the ‘family’ that is lacking in the word count has an interesting dynamic which I personally would have liked to read more about.

If you like a character-driven feminist novel that is influenced by current social problems, then Your Neighbours Table is a good one to pursue.

This novel is a slow-paced exploration of neighbours in a new government-supported housing project that aims to encourage reproduction - -
families who want to access this cheaper type of housing are encouraged to have three children if they get accepted for the housing project - which seems awfully intrusive and shows a very unhealthy level of government involvement in family planning. This narrative links in with the issue of the declining birth rate in South Korea, something that many industrial nations experience but is in Korea specifically is also linked with the country's deep-seated issues with patriarchal systems, the oppression of women, lack of free access to childcare and social support systems, financial pressures on young families, mental health struggles especially among women, sexual harassment issues and traditionalist family models. In the novel even a young 6-year-old girl is seen to have to take on childcaring duties which she's never signed up for, more so than her stay-at-home father who should actually be the one responsible for child care but has made weaponised incompetence his daily bread. The story is told from several of the neighbour women's perspectives and shows their struggles and how they cope with the daily frustrations they encounter. It was maddening but in a subtly crafted fashion. There are plenty of Korean novels which explore the role of women in society, such as Cho Nam-joo's "Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982", Kang Hwa-gil's "Another Person" or Han Kang's "The Vegetarian" - some weave these themes in subtly while others are rage-bait, but in their own ways they all show the exhaustion, depression and rage of Korean women and the unfulfillment many find in heterosexual relationships in a patriarchal society. I liked the understated way in which this novel approached these topics. However, it's a little too slow-paced and could have used a smidgeon more plot development, and the ending came rather rushed.

Sadly ,I've had to do a soft dnf for now and come back to the book in the future. I think the writing was very good. Based on what I've read so far I would still recommend this to people I know would love this type of story.

'Your Neighbour's Table' is a short and unsettling novel about a communal facility that was set up by the government to help families.
It's told from multiple points of view and it explores many issues South Korea is dealing with today - low birth rate, the pressure and expectations of motherhood, and patriarchy.
It's a slow burn, but I enjoyed that.
Thanks to the publishers for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.

This was a very gentle, easy book to read, so many messages within.
It was very sweet, very quiet, but powerful.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This short novel - Your Neighbour's Table, or Apartment Women as I have seen it called as well, was really good, although unsettling. It was not as dystopian as I had imagined from the blurb at the back - it focuses on 4 couples who have moved to a nice new building in the middle of nowhere, and are living communally, sharing childcare, with a state-subsidized accommodation if they commit to having at least two more children.

There's the couple that loves to rule everything and just knows better than everyone else, and walks around giving advice to others about how to live their lives; there's the freelance illustrator trying to keep up with her deadlines and trying to preserve her time to work from home, a job no one takes seriously; there's the mum working in a pharmacy while her husband stays at home... They were all different but all seemed trapped by motherhood and by the expectations of them, and the atmosphere of the book felt suffocating.

I really enjoyed it, and I liked the translation, it felt very smooth. It was a subtle enough book in its feminist message, and I will keep thinking about it.

Your Neighbour's Table
By Gu Byeong-mo

Translated from the Korean, this is a slim novel centred around a communal living pilot scheme, featuring four couples, parents of young children, who hope that by combining their child minding abilities and resources they will have extra freedom to pursue life and career opportunities and some extra disposable income.

Themes of community, parenthood, balancing work and early childhood, differing opinions on parenting style, and the claustrophobia of enforced proximity are all explored, albeit it in a polite and surface level way.

It's an easy read and it's interesting to read about modern Korean life, but it is a little pedestrian for my taste.

Thanks to Netgalley for providing an EGalley for review purposes.