No One Writes Back

Jang Eun-Jin

The narrator leaves home with his blind dog and an MP3 player. He travels aimlessly for three years from motel to motel. He assigns numbers to those he meets on the road, and writes to one of them at the end of every day in an attempt to cheer them up. No one ever writes back: but they might.
Slow to start but as we learn more about the narrator's life we begin to care about him. A book about communication which will linger in your mind.

Extract

"They say that people lie more when they write e-mails than when they write letters on paper. I don't like digital correspondence. I like analog letters. You can keep it by your side and take it out and read it whenever and wherever you are. It's inconvenient to have to boot up your computer every time you want to read a letter,and it seems a little cold, and a waste to pay the cost of electricity to read and write a letter. I mean, writing is a basic human act, and to think that it requires money makes it seem a little .....And a person's character and dignity show through their handwriting, in subtle ways."

Parallels