Behind Five Willows by June Hur
Set in the same time period as Pride and Prejudice but in Korea, Behind Five Willows follows two young people in love with stories. Haewon secretly spends her free time as a scribe in the back of a bookshop—a job as exciting as it is illegal. When she meets Seojun, she dislikes him immediately. He’s wealthy, privileged, and stuck-up. But he’s also harboring a secret just as dangerous as hers: he writes fiction under the pen name Black Lotus. As his alter ego, he’s been writing to his favorite transcriber, Magpie, for some time. Through their immediate antipathy, neither of them realizes they might already know the other. Will learning the truth be enough to overcome the differences between them, especially with the threat of discovery hanging over their heads?
Few Pride and Prejudice retellings are able to capture the social and class dynamics at play between Lizzy and Darcy as well as Behind Five Willows does. That and its rich exploration of a time and place as unique as Regency England make it one of my all-time favorite Pride and Prejudice retellings.