Cassie McCullough

And that is that the blokes are all businessmen who pay money for the company of women in these places.

And of course, the women don't get very much of the money that the men pay to spend time with them.

There's a sliding scale.

Some of them are very obviously all about sexual transactions and some of them perhaps hide that a little bit more.

And maybe that's where the price difference is as well.

Yeah, so we get a bit of a cultural excursion, I think, into Korea.

And I think partly that's what this book's about, because Francis Cha actually was a travel writer.

And I sort of do feel like I've been taken as an outsider into a world and I'm being guided around it.

Well, South Korea is famous for having the highest levels of cosmetic surgery and it's quite an art form there.

But we do learn about some of the procedures that seem extremely painful, like the shaving down of jawbones to create a less square face.

And just about everybody has the double eyelid surgery done, it seems, although some have it done better than others.

And this is one of the subplots there.

One of the girls, Shu Jin, is very disappointed with her job and really is quite envious of Kairi's work, which is so good, you'd almost swear that she's naturally beautiful.

So, you know, this is a real part of life, but it's used in this book as a way of describing for us how women are subjugated in just another fantastically, you know, exquisitely painful way.

And that's where the title comes from.

It's quite literally someone...

Saying if I had your face, I'd be a lot happier than you are.

I found, Kate, I couldn't quite separate all the women apart.

I was always, because it's told through, you know, each chapter is through a different voice.

And sometimes I was finding trouble differentiating between those voices.