“Enthusiasm spread like a virus in the way that you always hope will happen,” Molly Stern, the publisher of Hogarth, said. “We’ll see if that virus spreads into the reading public.”

The story centers on Yeong-hye, a melancholy housewife who is haunted by violent dreams that drive her to stop eating meat. Her abusive husband views her vegetarianism as an act of rebellion, while her brother-in-law becomes obsessed with her increasingly emaciated figure and her bluish birthmark, and lures her into performing in his sexually explicit video art. Like a cursed madwoman in classical myth, Yeong-hye seems both eerily prophetic and increasingly unhinged when she begins starving herself, hoping to transform into a tree.

Ms. McBride, the author of “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing,” said she was struck by “the alignment of extraordinarily lyrical prose with incredibly brutal content.”

“The tension between the two creates a very singular effect within the reader; a sense of complete immersion and utter disorientation all at once,” Ms. McBride wrote in an email. “The technical achievement is astonishing and all the more so because she never allows you even a glimpse at the seams.”

If Ms. Han gains a broad American readership, she will be one of the first South Korean authors to do so. While American publishers have become more willing to take risks on works in translation, particularly since the commercial success of international authors like Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Haruki Murakami, literary imports from South Korea remain scarce. Just a few prominent contemporary South Korean novelists have been published in the United States, including Young-ha Kim and Kyung-sook Shin.

Some scholars, editors and translators say it is a shame that South Korea’s vibrant and diverse literary culture has been largely overlooked by Western publishers, even as other Korean cultural exports like K-pop have spread across the globe. “There are so few works of Korean literature in translation, especially contemporary stuff,” said Ed Park, a Korean-American novelist and executive editor at Penguin Press.