Nobel Prize winner for Literature, South Korean author Han Kang demonstrates why she was a worthy winner for that award in her latest book (published in Korean in 2021) and the most recent to be translated into English (by E Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris) – We Do Not Part. Described as a companion piece to Human Acts, her novel about the Gwangju Uprising in 1980, We Do Not Part stands witness to the massacre of civilians on the island of Jeju in the years following World War 2 and the ongoing impact of those events.
The novel is primarily narrated by Kyungha, a stand in for the author, who is still struggling after writing about another massacre. Kyungha has had a disturbing dream and had planned, with the help of her old friend and colleague Inseon, to recreate the vision of that dream in reality. But before any of that can come to fruition she is called to a hospital in Seoul where she finds Inseon recovering from a serious woodworking accident. Inseon asks Kyungha to go immediately to her house in a remote area of Jeju Island to feed her pet bird, who was left alone in the rush and will die without food and water. Kyungha’s journey, through snow and ice will be traumatic, but more so are the revelations that follows.
We Do Not Part is very much a novel in two parts. The first documents Kyungha’s harrowing journey through a blizzard to find Inseon’s house. This section has some surreal and dreamlike qualities as Kyungha battles against the elements and darkness to find her way. The second half of the novel has the feel of a ghost story and it is hard to know what is real and what Kyungha is imagining. Memories of the massacre of civilians in Jeju in a supposed fight against communism, are revealed to Kyungha through a series of testimonies and documents. In particular there is a focus on Inseon’s family – both sides of which were affected by these events.
We Do Not Part is both beautiful and harrowing, the translation seeming to capture a sense of poetic imagery. Han Kang uses the persistent snow and to soften and slow down the momentum of the story which gathers weight as the scale and the callousness of an operation which wiped out whole villages and communities is slowly brought to light.
Information about the Jeju Island massacre was officially repressed and censored in Korea until 2000 when the Korean Government launched a formal investigation into these events. This led to an official apology from the Korean Government to victims and their families in 2003 and, in 2019, an apology from the South Korean police and defence ministry for their involvement. Han Kang is one of a number of Korean authors (Hwang Sok-yong is another), who are determined to ensure that these darker incidents and events of modern Korean history, and the people impacted by them, which had previously been repressed, are not forgotten.
We Do Not Part is not only an absorbing and effective elegiac novel. It stands as an important testament to and memory of a dark aspect of modern Korean history.

🗻 REVIEW 🗻

We Do Not Part by Han Kang, translated by Emily Yae Won and Paige Aniyah Morris

Release Date: 6th February

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5/5

📝 - One morning in December, Kyungha receives a message from her friend Inseon saying she has been hospitalized in Seoul and asking that Kyungha join her urgently. Airlifted to Seoul for an operation, Inseon has had to leave behind her pet bird. Bedridden, she begs Kyungha to take the first plane to Jeju to save the animal. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and snow squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save Inseon’s bird—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn’t yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness which awaits her at her friend’s house. There, the long-buried story of Inseon’s family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in the archive painstakingly assembled at the house, documenting a terrible massacre on the island.

💭 - Wow. That was my first Han Kang read and I am now so looking forward to the rest of them. She has such an incredible way of writing that draws you in, and this story captured me so much that it took me less than 2 days to finish. I wasn’t really sure what to expect when I started reading it - I had only glossed over the summary - and I think that helped really draw me in as I wasn’t sure where it was going. The stories of Inseon’s family, while harrowing, were done with such care and thought, and really opened my eyes to history of Korea that I wasn’t too familiar with. I’m now very interested in reading more about the Korean War, so any recs of good novels or non-fiction on this would be much appreciated! Highly recommend this one!

#hankang #wedonotpart #nobelprizeliterature #bookreview #bookstagram #bookstagrammer #bookreviewer #bookrecommendations #advancereaderscopy #netgalley #netgalleyreads

Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature last year so I thought perhaps that her writing might be difficult to approach; I couldn’t have been more wrong: it’s straightforward at the sentence level but rich in its descriptions and the emotions it evokes.
When we meet Kyungha, she is slowly making her way out of a deep crisis, following family separation and bereavement during which she isolated herself almost completely from the world. When her friend and former colleague Inseon is hospitalised in Seoul following an accident for which Kyungha feels some responsibility, she feels obliged to meet Inseon’s urgent request to rescue her budgerigar. She travels to Inseon’s home on the island of Jeju, south of the South Korean mainland, by plane, bus and foot in a snowstorm, racing the onset of one of her flooring migraines. I found beauty in the detail of Kyungha’s journey and days spent cut off from the world, echoing her earlier state but this time literal, in a rural house with no water or power after the storm. The weather is ever-present: wind, cold and – chiefly – snow in all its myriad glory.
She recalls previous visits to the house, Inseon’s stories of her childhood in Gwangju, and the documentary films she made about the uprising there and in Jeju, and the wars in Vietnam and Manchuria. Walking in the snow in Seoul and by candlelight in the hills of Jeju, Inseon tells her own family’s story from the Jeju uprising and associated massacres. Over the years the two had worked and travelled together, they had discussed a project Kyungha had envisioned in a dream: black tree trunks like grave markers in a flood tide that reminded her of people huddling in the snow.
Just as I was thinking there was no supernatural element to the story (as there is in Han Kang’s most famous work, The Vegetarian, and the short story from which it grew), in Part Two a seed of doubt is sown – what has Kyungha really experienced and what has she dreamt? Is she seeing ghosts? Or are we witnessing another possible reality? It’s not clear what is reality, what is dreamed and what is ghostly; no matter, as it’s compelling. Brava too to the translators e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris.

Han Kang is one of my FAVOURITE authors and thus, I was incredibly excited for her newest release after having read everything by her already translated into English.

I do think that this is unfortunately my least favourite from her yet. One thing I do absolutely adore about Han Kang and her craft is her incredible ability to document real historic periods with grace, consideration and so much power; this was no different. The pacing however, felt so incredibly slow and I never felt connected to our protagonist or any of the secondary characters despite the 'diary' style narrative. Needless to say though, there were many beautiful quotes in this and I'm still so thankful that I read it!

Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher and the author for this eARC.

I feared I might be too late to hop on the Han Kang train but this was a scorching introduction to their talent and I am now desperately sourcing as many of her other books as I can. It has been a while since I last read a book so compulsively and I feel, from the opening chapter's visceral nightmare, until the final page, this book has its hooks in you. As opaque as the view through the novel's endless snow storms, this feels like a twisty, eerie midwinter dream that you wander through as breathless and lost as the narrator. Part fairy tale, part ghost story, it carries with it the history of a nation swaddled in the gauze of imagination and fiction and yet, at times, brutally exposed. I loved how little was answered and yet how much was shared in this novel and its themes of human memory, connection, destruction and revival.

As someone with very little knowledge of Korean history, perhaps impacted by how much of this information was suppressed, the backdrop of this novel is shocking and confronting. Everything is tainted by the memories of the Jeju 4.3 massacre of 1948 and the trauma that still exists on both a personal and national level. While you go on a perilous journey through a snowstorm with the protagonist to try to save her friend's bird, you also navigate the often tragic, always difficult journeys of those who experienced the massacre, both those who lived and those who died. As with any good midwinter tale, ghosts swirl up and die down along with the storm and yet, just as the ground freezes solid, their presence, their experiences are indelibly stained upon the land and upon Korea's national identity.

At times, this novel is almost as suffocating as the snow that blankets the ground - the stories unravel at a propulsive rate and you find yourself unable to look away while, like the protagonist, begging for it to end. I have never read a work of fiction which helps you to feel so palpably the true horror and scale of a massacre, and which forces you to address the privilege you have in being able to look away, in being able to put the book down, while also robbing you of that right by being so breathlessly unforgettable.

Han's writing is ethereal, lucid and exquisite - the imagery within the piece is skilful and the multiplicity of each image's meaning prompts the reader to delve into the complexities of these experiences, of the way history lingers. I particularly enjoyed the repeating motif of the water cycle - how this snow might once have touched, have covered the bodies of the dead, and the way the characters grapple with what this means. We do not part because we cannot? Because we are haunted by those lost in every natural cycle? Because time is impermeable - the same water molecules are both frozen and unfrozen at different points in time. Equally, the snow repeatedly covers the ground, the characters, people's actions in this book and so could it represent a complicity? A national agreement to hide the truth? Or that the truth has been smothered? While this book focusses on one atrocity, it poses so many questions around the executions and genocides taking place across the globe and it does so with the lightest touch, the most skilled phrasing.

An unforgettable introduction to Han Kang who is undoubtedly an author whose works I will delve into many times in the future!

4*

Han Kang’s latest translated work is a quiet yet powerful exploration of violence, trauma, suffering and humanity, that resists an easy interpretation.

The subject matter focuses on a series of brutal killings and massacres that began in Jeju Island in 1948, in which tens of thousands of people, including children, were killed in an attempt to stamp out communism. The actual reporting of these events was suppressed and it is likely that a western audience will know little about this part of South Korea’s history, myself included. This almost lends itself to Kang’s eerie storytelling, as the narrative shifts around from reporting and testimony, to ghost stories and dream sequences, all whilst retaining Kang’s efficient lyricism.

The historical events are filtered through two old friends - Kyungha, the narrator, and Inseon, her guide to Jeju Island and the generational trauma she experienced as the daughter of parents who survived the slaughter by chance. Whilst the historical events are horrifying, their friendship and love serve as a light to cut through humanity’s suffering. The novel may be bleak, but it is also beautiful and hopeful.

As always, Han Kang’s writing is gorgeous. The narrative itself keeps the reader in a liminal space as it jumps around characters, time and place, between dream and reality. The language perfectly mirrors this as she writes with a haunting poetry throughout. The novel opens with description of snow and crystals and these become a motif throughout the novel. This liminality allows Kang and the reader to grapple with difficult questions.

We Do Not Part by Han Kang
(Translated by e. yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris)
Han Kang’s We Do Not Part is an atmospheric and haunting novel that has stayed with me after reading.
The novel follows Kyungha, a writer struggling with debilitating migraines, depression and isolation. Her hospitalised friend, Inseon, begs her to journey through a brutal snowstorm to Jeju Island to rescue her pet bird. From Kyungha’s arrival in Jeju things start to get dream-like and ghostly.
In the second and third parts of the novel, Kyungha confronts the history of Inseon’s family. It brings together personal trauma with national tragedy, particularly the repressed horrors of the Jeju Uprising. Snow, not just the weather setting in the background, becomes a character- obscuring and revealing, bringing pain and comfort.
Han’s prose is beautiful yet restrained, and the translation by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris is incredible - capturing both the eerie beauty and emotional depth of the story.
Many thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Harrowing while at the same time hauntingly poetic. I read up about the Jeju massacre before starting this book, which helped as this is not a history I have studied at school and I know very little about it.

I loved following Kyunghaya, depressed and lonely, suffering from migraines, as she rushes to Jeju island from Seoul at the request of her long-time friend Inseon, lying in hospital. There was a dreamlike quality to this short novel, and the long journey in the snow to reach Jeju really helped build up to the last third of the book, which is even more dreamlike, and follows different timelines, both imagined and remembered, by various characters. Inseon's mum was extremely moving, her memories failing her as she unravels what happened to her and her family and to several hundred thousands of people. I found something touching in the shared history that Kyunghaya becomes involved in and in the friendship she and Inseon have, as they retrace the histories of Inseon's mum and of other elderly women.

It's a hard book to describe but it is certainly impactful and poignant.

Free ARC sent by Netgalley.

4★
“Stooped and listing, they gave the impression of a thousand men, women and haggard children huddling in the snow.

Was this a graveyard? I wondered. Are these gravestones?”

This is part of Kyungha’s dream, which is based on a dream the author had that inspired this book. The entire opening segment is almost exactly how the author recounted her dream in an NPR interview.

In the story, Kyungha says she dreamed this not long after her book about a massacre was published. She is suffering in sweltering summer heat with broken air conditioning, and when she finally sleeps, she’s dreaming snowy scenes that she thinks might be from her future. She sees the tide encroaching on the ‘gravestones’ and sites of bones that will be washed away.

Awake, she is so hot that she considers ending her life.

“The previous summer, as my private life began to crumble like a sugar cube dropped in water, back when the real partings that were to follow were only a premonition, I’d written a story titled ‘Farewell’, a story about a woman of snow who melts away under sleet. But that can’t be my actual, final farewell.”

She falls asleep on the floor only to dream so strongly of snow and the ‘graves’ that she knows she can’t give up – she has to do something about them.

Summer ends, and Kyungha is surprised by a text message from her close friend, Inseon, saying only her name: ‘Kyungha’. When she texts back, asking if everything is all right, she receives only: ‘Can you come right away?’

Inseon is a filmmaker with a focus on women and war, and the two young women have been planning to do a project together one day, making logs into standing “torsos” representing those who were massacred during WWII.

Inseon is now in a Seoul hospital, requiring urgent, continued care, and she presses Kyungha to please please please go to the little village on the island of Jeju where Inseon lives to save her last adored bird and stay in the house until Inseon is released.

The book opens with unbearable heat and moves to an almost unbelievable cold, all with an eerie, moody, haunting quality. There are dreamlike sequences that seem real to Kyungha.

In her NPR interview, Han Kang explains why there was such focus on snow.

“Snow; It falls between the sky and the earth and connecting the both. And it falls between the living and the dead, between light and darkness, between silence and memories. And I thought of the connection, the circular flow of water and air. We are all connected over this earth so I had this image of the snow. I wanted the snow to fall from beginning to end and I wanted even my characters to enter into that dream of snow.”

There is a lot of history – of which I admit I am ignorant. There are stories of horrifying massacres, people hiding in caves in the hills, the sorts of awful stories I’m more familiar with from Europe during WWII.

Her writing is absolutely compelling. I haven’t read any of her other work, but I have some idea of why the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to her.

The facts, the history, the descriptions, the dreamlike quality and moodiness are beautifully drawn, well worth five stars. But – and for me it is a big ‘but’ - sadly, I was never invested in the characters and their story.

Thanks to #NetGalley and Penguin UK for a copy of #WeDoNotPart for review.

The NPR interview the author: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrYj1Wt_U0w

We Do Not Part is a hauntingly beautiful story of friendship, grief and love. Subtly magical, and wholly poignant, it is packed with sharp intellectual commentary and emotional depth. I enjoyed the novel immensely, the references to the massacre were immensely powerful and brutal, confronting the reader with stark reality. I definitely feel this is a novel I will read again, there is just so much to unpack. I will be recommending!

A painfully haunting read for anyone who comes from a country of persecuted people.

Dark and harrowing, Kang blends the line between the real and surreal, giving the reader a sense of daze and confusion - ultimately reinforcing how we feel recalling atrocities of the past.

A thoroughly impactful novel.

This is the book about snow, ghost, massacre, more snow and little birds. An old woman is waiting for a bus in the snow, two friends are looking at newspaper clippings, water rising in a dream - the book transports the reader right there, in that particular moment, with such vivid realness that it's truly uncanny.

I don’t even know how to write a review for We Do Not Part, because it is a book so extraordinary that there’s no way I can do it justice with my words.

It is exquisitely written, without a wasted word. It is a story of trauma, of memory, of healing, friendship and the lasting impact of war. The book carries its artisans wears it like a coat, and completely took my breath away as the story unfolded itself.

This book is really special. You can see why Han Kang has received the Nobel Prize because despite being one of the best written books I’ve ever read, at its heart it is still a story about humans and our flaws and fears and is as touching as it is harrowing. I can not do this book justice, you just need to experience it.

I had never read a Han Kang book, but after she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024, I was extra curious to pick up her books. Human Acts will remain in my TBR (for now), but I’m so glad to have had the opportunity to read this new release. I was not sure what exactly to expect from such a writer, but any expectations I might have had were surpassed. This book is transcendent, it’s atmosphere so visceral and descriptive that I could feel the cold seeping into my bones and the snow falling on my skin while I read.

This starts like another book, about friendship and choices characters make, and then turns into something different and darker, remembering a hidden chapter of Korean history. Han Kang clearly has a way with words and employs a prose like no other, full of metaphors and symbolism that end up bringing emotion but never overloading the text.

I was swept away and even if this was a short novel, I left this story different than when I went in: the portrayal of generational trauma and the scars that brutal acts leave on people and nations, the grief, this part of history that I never knew about, how history is sometimes buried and never brought up again… No matter the genre, this is what made me fall in love with books: Literature is a way to not only explore different worlds, but also to discover the truth of our own. Even when it is not a pretty picture. Specially when it is not a pretty picture. If we don’t know, if we don’t remember, how can we ever hope to learn from it and do better?

I find Kang an interesting writer but one that I'm not sure if I like or not.
I found the details about the massacre and history of Korea fascinating, and told in such a way that you can't hide from the details - which is as it should be.
I also found her descriptions of migraine to be very well done and as a sufferer myself felt that she described my experiences well.

However I am not so sure that I fully followed the more dreamlike/fantastical sections of the book and I did find myself speed reading to get back to the factual parts of the story.

We Do Not Part by Han Kang, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris
⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 stars
Publication date: 6th February 2025

Thank you to Viking Books and Netgalley for providing me with an e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

One morning in December, Kyungha receives a message from her friend Inseon saying she has been hospitalized in Seoul and has had to leave her pet bird behind. Bedridden, she begs Kyungha to take the first plane to Jeju to save the animal. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but wonders if she will arrive in time to save Inseon's bird - or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step.


I am very new to Han Kang, having just read The Vegetarian a few days ago, followed immediately by this one. And my lack of knowledge about Korean history might be doing this book a disservice. This is a book about history, the violent history of a repressed uprising which led to tens of thousands of people from Jeju Island being executed, and what historians consider to be the beginning of the Korean war.
But, and very importantly, this is a story about bearing witness, about not forgetting or erasing this event and the generational trauma it engendered (information about the Jeju uprising was censored in South Korea for several decades.)
In this book, this archiving of history is wrapped in a fever dream of a story with multiple timelines and confusing narration, which remains ambiguous to the end. The writing is beautifully atmospheric, with heavy symbolism and imagery about shadows, snow, water and darkness. I'm definitely not clever enough to have grasped all the subtleties of Kang's writing, but I think it's left its mark and is something I'm likely to think about for a long while.

This is of course another masterpiece from this amazing writer. The themes of loss, remembrance and friendship are powerful. I will admit to finding this book a bit hard-going because of the subject-matter, but that's my problem, not the book's or the author's.

A beautifully written book about generations of trauma. I did find the structure difficult to grasp at first but ultimately, I would recommend thisnhughly

I have never read a Han Kang, but after her Nobel win I couldn't resist trying out the novel people are claiming is the reason she won. I'm so glad I have finally read some of her work. The atmosphere this creates is so visceral, the cold seeped into my bones and the darkness of the forest made even the brightest days feel dark. Han Kang clearly has a way with words and it bent so effortlessly under her care, I was swept away. And for such a short novel so much was included. A strong, beautiful female friendship, a ghost story, a discussion on generational trauma and the scars that brutal acts leave upon the lands. This is a part of history that I never knew about, and I love that literature can bring such events back into the light so we don't forget the past and can learn from it. Literary fiction like this makes me wish I was still doing my literature degree so that a group of us could pull apart everything about this novel because there is so much to discuss within its' pages.
I wish we knew what really happened at the end with our main characters, but I also love the yearning the book has left me with. This isn't a novel I'll forget for a long time,

“I don’t know what set it off, the shaking. My body seemed to be racked by sobs, though my eyes remained dry. Was this terror? Or anxiety, agitation, perhaps an abrupt anguish? No, it was a bone-chilling awareness.”⁣
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From: 𝘞𝘦 𝘋𝘰 𝘕𝘰𝘵 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘵 by Han Kang, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris⁣
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Happy pub day to this gorgeous book and thank you @prhinternational for the gifted copy! ⁣
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Reading this book felt like a lesson in writing, without feeling like a chore. ⁣
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I remember devouring 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘝𝘦𝘨𝘦𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘯 over the course of a day on a beach in Croatia. Maybe not the most appropriate scenery for the pretty dark subject matter of the book, but it had me in a chokehold and I just needed to keep reading. ⁣
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This book did the same. The content might be even darker and I had to take breaks here and there, but boy does it pay off. ⁣
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Kang has a way of completely immersing you in the protagonist’s world, but also making you doubt what is real and what is imaginary. Dreams and real historical images get blurred and she hints at this with such beautiful imagery, for example when she talks about birds: “What was it like to live with two fields of vision? I wondered. Maybe it was like this out-of-time round for two voices. Or like living a dream and reality at once.” ⁣
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And of course the snow. I can’t write about 𝘞𝘦 𝘋𝘰 𝘕𝘰𝘵 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘵 without trying to explain to you how beautiful Kang writes about snow. The innumerable ways she uses it to create a scene, a feeling, but also to make certain points. Snow can be heavy and compacted but also weightless in its individual flakes. Snow can block out sounds and it can erase things from view. One of the most haunting images is when she tells of the snow that doesn’t melt on the face of a person killed in a massacre. But there is so much more that I won’t go into too much, because I think it is best to experience it for yourself.