Written for readers who have finished Book 1.
Yun Soon-ok is Min-ho's mother: ninety, small, neat and still upright, and the grandmother of the family Seo-yeon married into. She prays at dawn with the elders' mothers and comes home from it softened, and her room is the one place in a busy, careful household where anything is plainly felt. She notices more than she says, takes a quiet reading of a tired face across the breakfast table, and now and then lets slip a fragment of a childhood lived under the colonial occupation, eighty years gone. Nobody in the house quite has time to listen.

Deacon Baek Ji-hoon is Seo-yeon's colleague at the counselling centre: somewhere in his fifties, soft-spoken…

Kang Ha-eun is Seo-yeon and Min-ho's daughter: twenty, halfway through a university degree, and the warmest…

Kang Min-ho is Seo-yeon's husband of twenty years: a corporate middle manager by day and, at Saebit Central…

Lee Seo-jin is Seo-yeon's younger sister, six years her junior, and the person the finest heresy-tester in…

Lee Seo-yeon is the heart of The Lampstand: a forty-seven-year-old senior researcher at a church-funded…

Rev. Oh Kyung-tae is the senior pastor of Saebit Central, a brilliant expositor in his sixties and the…