Lee Seo-yeon
Written for readers who have finished Book 1.
Lee Seo-yeon is the heart of The Lampstand: a forty-seven-year-old senior researcher at a church-funded cult-counselling centre in Seoul, and the finest heresy-tester in the country. For fifteen years she has sat across a desk from frightened families and told them, precisely and almost never wrongly, which teachers are false and which are true. Formidable, exhausted and impeccably correct, she is married to Min-ho, who keeps the machinery of the vast Saebit Central Church running, and shares a Seoul flat with him, their daughter and his ninety-year-old mother. Whatever her rigour has cost her, she keeps filed away. When a calm new order settles a frightened world, it is her desk the question lands on.