The 38th Parallel A novel by Samantha Johnson In the summer of 2025, at a tightly choreographed family-reunion event inside the Mount Kumgang resort, two strangers share a cigarette on a dark balcony and everything begins to unravel.Kim Ji-yeon is twenty-seven, quiet, watchful, the daughter of a high-ranking Pyongyang security official. She has spent years secretly watching smuggled South Korean dramas on a hidden screen, hoarding tiny glimpses of a life she is not allowed to want.Park Min-jun is twenty-nine, a brilliant, cynical hacker from Seoul who makes his living breaking systems and his family's living hating the North. He is only at the reunion because his mother still hopes to find someone, anyone, from the other side.One accidental conversation becomes a coded message, becomes a burner phone, becomes a reckless plan to meet again in China. What starts as curiosity ignites into a love neither of them knows how to name in a country that forbids it.Against encrypted apps that betray them, surveillance states that never sleep, and families who believe they are saving them by turning them in, Ji-yeon and Min-jun try to outrun a border drawn seventy years before they were born.A spare, unflinching story of desire and division, The 38th Parallel asks how far two ordinary people will go for a future that every system around them insists cannot exist-and what happens when history refuses to let them win.