This was a beautiful and heartbreaking book about a period of Korean history in which hundreds of thousands of civilians were massacred in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Dreams are intertwined with memory to tell the story, as the narrator pieces together the facts she learns about the past.
The main themes are friendship, family, perseverance and pain. What is it like to suffer from pain - both physical and emotional - and how do we cope with the pain of separation?
Most of the story takes place amidst a snowstorm, which emphasises the narrator’s isolation and is an eerie, but beautiful presence in the book.
Black and white are dominant colours, adding a cinematic quality to the imagery. The language is poetic and rich with symbolism.
The ghosts of the past become manifest through the ghostly presence of the narrator’s friend in the second half of the book - is she a spirit, a vision, a figment of imagination? Several questions are left unanswered at the end, but we are left with an overall feeling of sorrow for what we have learnt.

I really liked this! I felt like it had more plot than The Vegetarian, but was as weird and otherworldly (in a good way). It's an ambitious novel, but it reads very quickly and it was very immersive.

This book gave me every feeling under the sun and then some. It is such a beautiful tale of friendship and the lengths friends will go to for each other set with the backdrop of South Korea's tragic history. So many themes are touched on, but the main takeaways touch the concepts of family, loss, tragedy and most importantly friendship.

Kang's writing style is so unique and elegant which only adds to the specialness and weirdly cosy element of the storytelling. I loved Inseon's character and even though it wasn't told through her perspective, I still feel like by the end of the novel I knew her remarkably well. There was such strong imagery of weather, particularly the snow in Jeju Island, that was also written so beautifully. The only criticism is at times it did feel a little boring to read paragraph after paragraph focused solely on the weather when I felt I wanted to hear more about the plot.

Throughout the book, I felt Kang had a wonderful way of sustaining tension and she weaves this feeling of disorientation and bewilderment into the story alarmingly well. I think it speaks of Kang's gift as a writer to be able to create so much eeriness in the context of a snowstorm and with the absence of anything particularly spooky or evil. There were many moments were it felt like Kyungha was in a fever dream and we were seeing it so intimately through her eyes. Her quest to feed Ama was so devastating and in an odd way kind of uplifting too because it gave us a chance to see how much Kyungha valued her friendship with Inseon and more importantly how much she valued Inseon.

So many quotable moments, one of my faves has to be 'I had not reconciled with life, but I had to resume living.'

I wasn't crazy about the flashbacks, whilst they did help develop Inseon's character and provide useful context I did find the flashbacks sometimes disrupted the flow of the story and plot points. Not always, but sometimes I would be itching for the flashback to end so I could get back to Kyungha's harrowing trip to Jeju Island that I was already engrossed in. I also feel like this extended to the documentary moments in the book, I felt so engaged in the present day plot that I wasn't super attached to the documentary even though objectively I understood it was illustrating a historical tragedy that threaded all the way through to the current day characters.

However, I still think this book was multidimensional and enjoyable on so many levels. It is truly unique how Inseon's presence was plotted in this book despite only seeing her in the hospital at the beginning. It felt really original and moving despite the incredible task Kang set herself of making an interesting novel about friendship and our identity with tragedy.

Managing to be both surreal and build increasing tension, We Do Not Part is an exploration of self and history, of past trauma passed through generations and onto the landscape itself. Kyungha is called by her friend Inseon who pleads for her to come to her in hospital, and tasked with going to Jeju to save her bird. Through the dreamlike prose of Kang’s writing and the stream of consciousness form flitting seamlessly between present, past, and inconclusive future Kyungha discovers and is enveloped in South Korea’s dark history and how it is stamped upon Inseon’s family. A beautiful exploration of friendship, and the unravelling of past horrors.

I began this story with pretty low expectations because of the strange, dreamlike nature of the beginning. I'm not one for poetic and dreamlike prose. It begins with Kyunghaya, an author, trying to deal with her dreams and thoughts as she struggles to write the book we are reading.

It's an interesting device to write a version of yourself to explain the difficulties of writing an emotive novel.

The next part deals with the author's collaboration with a sculptor who has become her friend.

We Do Not Part deals mainly with the story of the sculptor's family and the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Koreans. It is not an easy read, but it will pull you in. The descriptions of the sculptor, her home and her family are beautiful and heartbreaking.

I may have started out with some reserve but by the end I struggled to put the book down.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Penguin General UK for the advance review copy. My love for Han Kang's work continues.

4.25/5

Dream-like, emotional, and brutally honest, “We Do Not Part” captures the Jeju massacres in vivid detail, while also addressing modern themes of family, fulfilment, love, and memory. The novel is split in two parts, with the first part focused more on Kyungha and her struggles in Seoul, and the second part set in Jeju, where the island’s horrible past is uncovered. Both parts had their distinct “vibes” and I appreciated the separation, as getting into the second part read like a nightmare, compared to the tangible coldness of the first half.

I enjoyed reading about between Kyungha and Inseon’s relationship as it developed, as well as Inseon’s own relationship with her mother. Every conversation had its purpose in revealing the bigger subject at hand, and the connectedness of it made it a satisfying reading experience. That being said, the book got incredibly emotional and I’m a sucker for maternal relationships in books. I definitely got teary-eyed, and was just shocked by the information revealed in the later half of this book. Reading this has taught me that I don’t know nearly enough about Korean history, and I feel moved to do my own research on such topics now.

Not for me. I just could not fathom what this was meant to be achieving. I abandoned it as not worth continuing and after skimming to the end. Prize winner…how?

I liked this book, but did not get along with mixed reality theme.
It is not clear at the latter end of the story which of the alternative realities presented was true.
What I did really like was the story of the astonishing friendship between the two main characters, very rare in reality but amazing if found.
The back story of the atrocities committed to many thousands of Koreans in the second half of the last century was harrowing, but probably necessary to tell.
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

We Do Not Part by Han Kang is a beautifully written, dreamlike exploration of memory, trauma, and history. Kyunghaya, a part-time teacher and writer, journeys to Jeju Island to care for her injured friend's bird and grapples with visions, mysteries, and Korea's violent past. The narrative blends the surreal and the historical, delving into the horrors of war and the weight of inherited pain. While the writing is undeniably beautiful, the story's deep ties to Korea's history left me feeling disconnected—I needed more background to fully grasp its layers. A thought-provoking but challenging read.

I didn't know what to expect going into We Do Not Part, because I never actually read the blurb before starting it. I just knew that I love Human Acts and the few pieces of Han Kang's short fiction that I've read, as well as the story "Heavy Snow" that appeared in The New Yorker late last year as an excerpt from this novel. I'd liked that piece a lot, and I really wanted to see the longer work that it came from.

It turns out that "Heavy Snow" is only sort of an excerpt from We Do Not Part. It takes pieces from a longer sequence - the majority of Part 1 of the novel, as it turns out - and abridges them, re-ordering and recontextualising them and adding new material to make the ellisions work. It's a seamless piece of work, and though "Heavy Snow" is a piece of this novel I think it's different enough that it stands alone. In its extended form here, that story takes on much more weight.

The first act, following Kyungha's journey from the hospital in Seoul into the forests of Jeju Island in the grip of an unending snow storm, is simply beautiful. It's quiet and contemplative but at the same time urgent and scary, and even though the stakes are on their face quite small - will Kyungha arrive at Inseon's house in time to prevent her pet bird from dying? - they're no less meaningful, underpinned as they are by the weight of years of friendship and obligation, by a history between these two characters that's shown to us only in small pieces.

The quiet beauty and escalating tension of Part 1 do an incredible job of priming us for the emotional impact of the rest of the novel. Once Kyungha reaches Inseon's home the story shifts into something that feels like a companion piece to Human Acts, as she is haunted by Inseon's past and discovers records around the Jeju uprising and massacre of 1948, in which the Korean government slaughtered thousands of civilians. I admittedly know very little about Korean history but, as with Human Acts, Han Kang presents the events she's concerned about in such a stark, unflinching way that it doesn't matter.
We Do Not Part's narrator is, herself, a writer who has previously written a novel about the massacre following the Gwangju uprising in 1980 - the same subject matter as Human Acts. Here Kyungha laments that she didn't tell the whole story in her book, that she allowed some of the atrocities to go unremembered. The final act of We Do Not Part grapples with ideas around forgetting and how we remember the dead, and how the past haunts the future.

This is a book with pain on every page, from Inseon's horrific injury at the beginning, to the frozen pain of Kyungha's journey and the uncovering of the terrible history in the back end of the novel. Kyungha, too, suffers with debilitating migraines, one of which grips her for most of the opening section of the novel. Both of the characters spend the entire book in pain that's exacerbated by their attempts to keep the past alive, and it would be easy to ask whether it's worth it. But the book closes with images that remind us that no matter how painful it may be, remembering is always an act of love.

We Do Not Part won the Prix Médicis étranger for its French translation, and I'll be very surprised if this English rendering doesn't appear on the International Booker Prize shortlist later this year.

I had promised myself not to read anything more by this author after “The Vegetarian,” but since she was then given the Nobel Prize for Literature, I tried to give her another chance. Netgalley then sent me this novel, dreamlike but based on true historical events that happened in Korea just after the end of World War II, the Korea of M.A.S.H. to be clear. I can't say it disturbed me like the previous book, but it certainly was not an easy read. This rarefied but heavy atmosphere, with the snowstorm, the cold and the absence of light, the flashbacks of Isehon's mother's past, the very peculiar protagonist and the two birds made everything almost chilling, nearly a horror book. So I would say that I tried, but I am definitely not able to appreciate even this Nobel Prize for literature.

Mi ero ripromessa di non leggere piú niente di questa autrice dopo "La vegetariana", ma siccome poi le hanno dato il Nobel per la letteratura, ho provato a darle un'altra chance. Netgalley quindi mi ha mandato questo romanzo, onirico ma basato su fatti storici veri accaduti in Corea appena dopo la fine della seconda guerra mondiale, la Corea di M.A.S.H. per capirsi. Non posso dire che mi abbia disturbato come il libro precedente, ma certamente non é stato una lettura semplice. Questa atmosfera rarefatta ma pesantissima, con la tempesta di neve, il freddo e l'assenza di luce, i flashback del passato della madre di Isehon, la protagonista molto particolare e i due uccelli hanno resto tutto quasi agghiacciante, quasi un libro d'orrore. Direi quindi che io ci ho provato, ma sicuramente non sono in grado di apprezzare nemmeno questo nobel per la letteratura.

I received from the Publisher a digital advanced review copy in exchange for a honest review.

The latest (to be translated into English novel) by the 2024 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature – due to be published later in 2025.

Overall I would say that this might be the perfect place to start with the Nobel Laureate as it is a perfect (and it has to be said deliberate) combination of her two strongest other translated novels – the austere, white dominated imagery of “The White Book” and the traumatic investigation into South Korea’s dark post war history of military massacres (something perhaps which will appear much less at discard with the world of K-Pop and bao buns with events in late 2024) which featured in “Human Acts”.

The novel in fact opens with its narrator Kyungha haunted by a dream of black tree trunks (which she sense are graves or possibly even people) dusted in snow on a dark shoreline – a recurring dream she initially traces to her own authorship of a novel which is effectively “Human Acts” (and a dream which Han Kang herself also experienced).

We learn that over time (time like reality versus dreams is a fluid concept in the novel) she had discussed with a close friend Inseon (they initially met with Inseon as photographer to Kyungha’s artistic writing) – who lives with her mother on the volcanic holiday Island of Jeju and has largely given up her art documentary film career to be a carpenter – a joint project to recreate Kyungha’s dream.

In the present day – when Kyungha has largely abandoned her idea – she is urgently summoned by Inseon to a Seoul hospital where Inseon is receiving critical treatment for two severed finger tips (finger tips and blood are one of a number of recurring images): Inseon was medevac’d to the mainland after her accident and wants Kyungha to travel urgently to her home on Jeju where she fears her budgie may be dying.

The rest of the first part of the novel is perhaps the strongest of the book in a literary/figurative – documenting Kyungha’s increasingly difficult and ultimately it seems unsuccessful trip across a snowbound Jeju to Inseon’s home.

Part II changes the novel significantly and is perhaps best explained by the author herself in her Nobel lecture: “If the first part is a horizontal journey that follows 9 the narrator, Kyungha, from Seoul to her friend Inseon’s home in the Jeju uplands through heavy snow towards the pet bird she has been tasked with saving, then the second part follows a vertical path that leads Kyungha and Inseon down to one of humanity’s darkest nights — to the winter of 1948 when civilians on Jeju were slaughtered — and into the ocean’s depths”

Kyungha wakes in Inseon’s house – only to find that both the bird (who she remembers burying) and Inseon (who should be in hospital) are present. She has already realised that Inseon has been -unbeknownst to her – carrying on with their aborted project and that her injury was connected with her cutting and shaling of the black tree trunks. At the same time, we learn via Inseon’s memories of her mother (often with her mother addressing us directly) of her mother’s involvement in tracing the covered-up and suppressed history of the Jeju 4:3 massacres including various direct family involvements.

This second part is very powerful indeed although I perhaps have two criticisms: firstly there are rather too many heavy handed early references to effectively “is this a dream”/”is this real” which are not really necessary when a novel is so obviously blurring images, dreams and reality; secondly at times the exposition of Jeju’s troubled history can be a little too heavy – I would have preferred more left to my own research.

A brief third part – where Inseon and Kyungha complete their act of remembrance ends this excellent (if slightly flawed) novel strongly.

“That is how death avoided me. Like an asteroid though to be on a collision course avoids Earth by a hair’s breadth, hurtling past at a furious velocity that knows neither regret nor hesitation.”

Han Kang’s We Do Not Part is an intricately woven but complicated narrative that seeks to question the unsettling beginnings of the Jeju massacre, when Kyungha visits her friend Inseon after a terrible wood-chopping accident. 

The novel's introduction was intriguing, but as it slowly revealed more, my interest waned. At most times, I was confused. The book’s main flaw was the narration—constant perspective shifts and unquoted dialogue let this book down in navigating the story. Where timelines intersected, the book was an overall mess. 

Another flaw I had with the book was the detachment of the characters, especially Kyungha. That could have been an intentional move on her part. However, I felt that her characterisation was lacking. We only witnessed her monologues and all before her personality fizzled out within the contemporary setting.

As this is my first Han Kang book, it was a shame to find this a disappointing read.

The standouts for me were the birds, Ami and Ama. Yeah, that is right. The animals at the beginning somehow met an unfortunate end within the book.

[Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin for a copy of an ARC in exchange for an honest review.]

I have read all Han Kang's works currently translated into English and have enjoyed them all, but I think We Do Not Part might be my favourite so far. Like Human Acts, this book focuses on a terrible historical event, in this case one that took place on Jeju island in the late 1940s. As such there is a lot of stark darkness within the work in terms of the subject matter, but this is contrasted with the lyrical poetics of the prose. Thus we drift back and forth between the terrible details of the events, more of which come to the fore as the book progresses, and the atmospheric description and philosophical pondering of the narrator as she navigates the emotions of her own life and those she experiences as she uncovers the story of events of Jeju, to which her friend has a personal connection. Elements of Human Acts weave through this work, and I feel that Kyungha and Han Kang sometimes overlap in this regard. This is a book both beautiful and horrifying, and I think that's where Han Kang's strength lies as a writer: the way she can combine the two. There is a deep sense of humanity in all her works, and the exploration of themes that are really universal, though seemingly focused on her country's history. I certainly hope more of her works will be translated in the future (or that my Korean will improve enough to read them in the original), and I am giving this book five stars.

(This review will go live on my blog, Goodreads and social media on 17 February, as per your preference to hold reviews until a week prior to publication. Links for where the review will be on Goodreads and my blog once published are below.)

This feels like a culmination of Kang's work to date. Echoes of Human Acts, The Vegetarian, and The White Book create a feeling of isolation, cold, and the lines between reality and dream. Han Kang is a true master of her craft, weaving metaphors and imagery together seamlessly to tell the story of Jeju 4:3. This book does have a sporadic storytelling style that switches between historical, thriller, literary, and so on, but maintains the metaphors and imagery that create a cohesiveness as a whole. I would recommend this for anyone who has read Kang before, but for those new to the author, I would recommend reading The Vegetarian and Human Acts before to have an extra layer of understanding to this book.

We Do Not Part by Han Kang, translated by Emily Yae Won and Paige Aniyah Morris, is an intimate and profoundly moving exploration of love, memory, and trauma. Through the interconnected lives of three women, Han delicately uncovers the shadows of Korea's dark history, particularly the Jeju uprising and its aftermath. The narrative blends dreamlike sequences with reality, a style that might initially seem disorienting but ultimately captivates with its poetic depth. Though painful in its portrayal of historical atrocities, the novel is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, showcasing love, friendship, and the pursuit of truth. Han's elegant and accurate handling of historical trauma sheds light on long-suppressed events, offering both a poignant literary experience and a vital historical reckoning.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for my free digital ARC of the latest Han Kang novel to be translated into English! Very exciting after she won the Nobel Prize this year, and I feel like this book really does encapsulate why she won, even if I *personally* wouldn’t consider it a perfect novel. This book delves deep into the tragic history of the Jeju uprising and the massacres that then took place and were shamefully covered up by the Korean government for a LONG, long time.

It can be a bit tricky to follow (don’t recommend reading it during the holidays when you’re easily distracted like me!), as it jumps around in time and perspective, splicing historic record with the present day narrative.

I was loving it to begin with - Kyungha receives a message from a friend who’s been hospitalised after a carpentry injury, asking her to go and take care of her bird while she recovers. Kyungha begins the arduous journey through treacherous weather to Inseon’s house, where dreamlike mirages begin to occur - I’m still not fully certain I understood everything that was going on, but it was certainly moving.

The language was always gorgeous, translated by E Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. Definitely do try and read it in wintertime, as the imagery is stunning.

2025 will be the year I also finally read the rest of Kang’s backlist, since I’ve only read this one and The Vegetarian YEARS ago 👀

A winter novel through and through. I was specifically taken with the first half of this novel, the bus journey through the snowy landscape is just very compelling in a quiet way.

The second half is delves more into historical events through a personal lense, this part is very harrowing.

Between 1948 and 1950 an estimated 30,000 inhabitants of the small Korean island of Jeju were murdered as part of a scorched earth policy to eradicate presumed Communist rebels on the island. Entire villages within an established perimeter were burnt down and men, women and children executed on beaches and in caves.

For decades, the government-led massacre was swept under the carpet, but since the early 2000s a truth commission has carried out an independent investigation and the horrible facts have been documented and brought to light.

Han Kang takes on the difficult task of fictionalising the 'Jeju massacre', and she pulls it off. 'We Do Not Part' is not a historical novel though, it retains Han Kang's unique style, playing with dreams and supernatural elements and also the vivid descriptions of excruciating pain and cruelty.

As in The Vegetarian and Human Acts we have a female protagonist, Kyungha, unable to cope with the demands of normal life. One day, Kyungha receives a call from her artist friend, Inseon, who needs her help urgently - she has sown off her fingers. The second half of the novel is more engaged, as it largely describes the massacre by way of presentating the research carried out by Inseon and discovered by Kyungha.

I found it really beautifully done - the snowy, dreamlike island with its silent secrets and the friendship between the two women struggling to find a way to recover and remember.

I have been putting this book off because I love Han Kangs other books but at the same time find them quite hard going. She’s very descriptive and really shows the reader what she wants to be seen.
I probably enjoyed this novel more than Kangs others with great characters and storyline.