A formidable account of a horrible history, steeped in brutal humanity and snow. It is an incredible read, which I wrote about in detail in my Substack review.

We Do Not Part is a harrowing and haunting story of grief, connection, pain and suffering. This was an unsettling read, but nonetheless powerful and poignant.

Writer Kyungha is called to a Seoul hospital to be with grimly injured best friend Inseon: one of the only people in the world that she has, on some level, been able to sustain a meaningful relationship with. Among their shared history was a plan - now largely abandoned - to collaborate on an art project to commemorate the victims of the Jeju 4.3 massacre.

But the rush to Inseon’s bedside is just the start of Kyungha’s journey. She is persuaded to travel onwards - alone and in the midst of a perilous snowstorm - to Jeju Island, where Inseon’s beloved bird, Ana, has been left unattended and will starve without urgent intervention.

As the physical and mental strain of the strange and arduous journey takes its toll, the feeling that both Kyungha and the reader are in an unnerving fever dream intensifies. The dark history of the island, and the devastating and long-lasting impact it has had on Inseon’s family, are brought to the forefront. Even if it’s not always clear what is real and what is a dream in Kyungha’s here and now, we are left with no uncertainty about the sheer horror of the events which took place on Jeju in 1948/49.

For fellow fans of Han Kang’s work, this is a must-read. But I’d recommend it even to those who maybe didn’t get on with previous of her novels; there is some kind of tenderness and poetry to We Do Not Part that feels fresh all over again.

I've always tended to avoid fiction that is described as dreamlike or hallucinatory, as too often it feels like an excuse for wafty writing. But of course, as we all know, dreams, when you're having them, are intensely real and unreal at the same time; they aren't actually vague at all. It's that quality that Han Kang captures in We Do Not Part [trans. e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris], her fifth novel to be translated into English and the first published since she won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year. Writer Kyungha and her carpenter friend Inseon had planned to work together on an art installation to commemorate those who died in the massacre on the South Korean island of Jeju in 1948. Known as Jeju 4:3 in South Korea because it occurred on April 3rd, this horrific event, which I first learnt about in Lisa See's The Island of Sea Women, saw the killing of about 10% of Jeju's population by government forces backed by the US administration as part of a purge of supposed 'leftists'.

Although Kyungha and Inseon later abandoned their project, Kyungha dreams insistently of 'thousands of black tree trunks' standing in snowy earth on a shoreline where 'the sea was crashing in'. When Inseon injures herself in a carpentry accident, she asks Kyungha to travel through a blizzard to her isolated cabin on Jeju to save the life of her pet bird, who has been left there alone. The first half of this book is Kyungha's journey through the snow; in the second half, even more surreal, Kyungha encounters a version of Inseon, who is going through old documents to trace the fate of her uncle after Jeju 4:3. The dominant metaphor here is that of sinking through layers of the deep sea until you reach the hadal zone, able only to look out at others through thick water. The way the stories of victims are interwoven with this narrative reminded me a little of Nona Fernández's The Twilight Zone, on those 'vanished' in Chile during Pinochet's era, but We Do Not Part is the stronger novel, deeply intentional in its use of echoes and reflections, like the painful, insistent pricking of Inseon's wounded fingers to ensure the nerves don't die. Having read both Kang's The Vegetarian and The White Book, neither of which made much impression on me, I was knocked for six by this hypnotic novel. 4.5 stars.

Han Kang We Do Not Part
⭐⭐⭐.5

A harrowing story about two friends haunted by the past of their ancestors.

Kyungha lives by herself, tormented by headaches and haunting dreams of past events. She doesn't go out, she hides inside to protect herself except for once a day to go eat around the corner. She wanders the street at night following a vision of soldiers patrolling the streets of Seoul ready to attack an invisible threat.
That's until her friend Inseon sends her a message to meet her immediately.

Inseon is in the hospital with a grim hand injury and she needs Kyungha to go to her house and save her pet bird Ama. From that moment we embark on a journey onto Jeju Island, to the small town Inseon is from and into a surreal conversation with the past.

An ode to friendship as well as a remembrance piece to the horrible happenings of the past. Han Kang uses quite a ghostly way to help the characters to remember and express their story and the ones of their ancestors. With alternating voices the story of the Jeju 4.3 massacre gets brought to light with lucid dreams, article interviews and the narration of Inseon which brought the story to a much deeper level.

I found this to be quite slow moving and a bit confusing at first, it took me a while to figure out what was going on and what the point of the book was. But I kept reading and it felt more like a ghost story and very surreal at some points.

I can't tell whether I've liked it or not, I feel quite neutral about it, but do not take this as a sign not to read it as you might feel differently ✨

Kyungha has been working on creative projects that examine the history of atrocities in Korea. Haunted by nightmares, she invites her friend, Inseon to help create a film based on one particular dream that she cannot shake. The project falters and eventually Kyungha believes she no longer needs it. When Inseon contacts her to say that she has sustained a terrible injury in attempting to make the work, Kyungha feels indebted to her. So when Inseon requests that Kyungha travel to Jeju Island and save her pet bird while she is in hospital, she feels obliged to help, even when the weather becomes dangerously problematic. At this point Kyungha's journey becomes something wilder and stranger. A snowy fever dream of a novel this is strange and unsettling, shot through with horror and a shifting sense of unease and confusion. For a short book where not much actually happens, it's very tense and at times I found it too much and had to put it down and come back to it later. It's brilliant but I'm not sure I'd read another book by Han Kang. I don't think my nerves could stand it.

Han Kang does not always make life easy for the reader. This book, like Greek Lessons, can be likened to leaping over a number of barriers; as what the story is is revealed in stages. We Do Not Part opens with writer and journalist Kyngha experiencing a nervous breakdown and withdrawing from the world. An old colleague Inseon, one of the few to keep in touch, sends her an urgent summons to hospital where she is immobilised after a serious accident.

Kyungha is dispatched to Inseon’s family home on Jeju Island, now deserted following the accident, on a mission of mercy to feed Inseon’s caged pet bird. Fighting migraines, stomach pains and sub-zero temperatures, this odyssey feels like it’s the central part of the book - as Kyungha has to battle a raging snowstorm and draw on reserves of determination she didn’t know she had.

These two sections however are only the prelude to the final third of the book, which takes place in the snowbound family home, but also in many other places past and present. Inseon materialises - or is imagined - and the two of them go ever deeper both into the snowy world around them and into Inseon’s horrific family story which centres on their suffering and loss during the massacres of Jeju inhabitants that occurred in the late forties. Kang brings the familial and the national, the past and the present, and the natural and human world together in a dazzling mix of remembrance and investigation. From the genesis of snowflakes to their plans for a wooden sculptural tribute nothing is wasted in this tightly-wound exhumation of Korea’s dark past.

There’s no easy resolution offered - the crimes of the past cannot be reconciled or forgiven, only acknowledged. It’s a devastating read.

Han Kang is an author that since I read Human Acts, is an author I have done my best to read everything she has published, and We Do Not Part is another example of why that is the case.

How Kang writes about pain, memory and grief is unmatched - the way she can write about people so intensely is so difficult for me to compare to anyone else. In this book we see the bond between friends examined and tested and written to perfection but also the acts of humans and how trauma effects generations and can run through families and in contrast.

Kyungha tells the story as it unfolds building us a picture of what is happening to her and what she feels from what surrounds her, from the crispiness of snow to the way trees swish in the breeze creating an atmosphere in this book that draws you in. The ominous tone threads its way through the book and builds to an intensity that I feel only this author does so well - it makes for such a haunting read.

Much like Human Acts this tells the story of people and remembering what people are capable of in the worst ways, she communicates this beautifully here once again creating connections between the past and present in the text that allows you to reach a new level of understanding of the text.

We are so lucky to be living at the same time this author is writing, and writing like this has never been more pertinent.

This novel had a certain dream like quality, and I found myself completely gripped. It was fascinating, and often felt quite heavy at times, to learn about a period of South Korea's history that I knew little about. Written wonderfully with striking metaphors and haunting imagery, this is well worth a read.

Many thanks to the author, publisher and Netgalley for providing an ARC of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

We Do Not Part is recent Nobel Prize winner Han Kang's most recent work. It is a dreamy, wintery and powerful story which shines a light on some tragic parts of South Korea's history.

Kyungha is called to her friend Inseon's hospital bedside after she has been taken to Seoul for an operation following a wood-chopping accident. Inseon asks Kyungha to go to her home on Jeju Island to feed her pet bird who has already been without food and water for several days. As Kyungha arrives a snowstorm hits and her travel to Inseon's home becomes very difficult. Eventually though she arrives and this is where things begin to turn very strange.

As the story flows we begin to understand the history of Inseon's family and their links to massacres on Jeju Island which claimed the lives of more than 30,000 civilians. I confess this had me googling as I knew nothing about this time in history.

We Do Not Part was full of beautiful descriptive language. The landscape and the winter climate were evoked perfectly and you felt immersed in the cold and snow. It was also eerie and very otherworldly once Kyungha makes her way to Inseon's remote home.

While I did enjoy reading this I didn't love it. The second part of the novel does become a bit strange and there is a lot of pondering about whether what is happening is a dream or reality. The historical references also become very explicit and while it is undoubtedly important to highlight the history and massacres it began to read like a history account rather than a novel at times. There was also a lot of symbolism much of which I think went over my head.

I preferred reading the first part but I appreciated learning more about South Korea's past. It also makes me want to read more of Kang's work as I have only read The Vegetarian to date.

Thank you @netgalley and @vikingbooksuk for my #gifted copy. We Do Not Part is out later this month in Australia.

Han Kang’s writing is always beautiful, Human Acts remains my favourite of hers so far but I love how her books make me think and how they teach me about parts of history I’d never even heard of.

As I’m planning to visit Jeju this year, learning about Jeju 4:3 in this book and then reading testimonies of victims is making me think of the place in a whole new way and I’m glad I got to learn about this before going.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for this advanced reader's copy and the opportunity to this early. Review has been posted on Waterstones and Amazon.

We Do Not Part is an incredibly powerful novel by Han Kang, one that explores the depths of history, loss, and the unbreakable bond of friendship. It tells the story of the Jeju Massacre, an event I was unfamiliar with before reading, yet Han Kang brings it to life in such a way that it feels impossible to ignore. With tenderness and strength, she captures the personal and collective trauma of this dark moment in Korean history.

What really stands out in We Do Not Part is Han Kang’s signature dreamlike style. The novel is filled with moments where reality and memory blur together, giving it a surreal quality that perfectly mirrors the characters’ internal worlds. This not only deepens the emotional impact of the story, but also lets readers experience the haunting effects of trauma in a very personal, almost physical way.

What immediately stood out upon reading was the recurring motif of snow, which captures how the memories of the massacre are frozen in time, shaping Inseon’s life and her mother’s long after the event. The snow symbolises the generational weight of trauma, covering their lives in a way that prevents them from moving forward.

The beauty of this novel lies in how it intertwines history with the personal, showing how the scars of the past can shape who we are, how we love, and how we survive. We Do Not Part isn’t just about remembering a tragic event, but about the healing power of human connection and the way that friendship can offer hope, even in the darkest times. Han Kang’s writing is lyrical and profound, making this book a powerful exploration of both the resilience of the human spirit and the complexities of Korea’s history.

I’ve sat on this review for a while because I always find it hard to talk about books that move me in some profound way. We Do Not Part is the latest offering by Nobel prize winner Han Kang and it’s a heavy book, the kind that presses down on your chest as you read it.

I don’t mean this to put you off – sometimes we have to be haunted by a book in order for our senses and perceptions to be shifted. Great literature isn’t always there to make us feel comfortable and this is a book that will push you - both in the topics it’s exploring and through its surreal writing, where the narrative is not always entirely clear.

But grief, trauma…these aren’t straightforward things. They don’t follow a linear path. It feels right that a book going deep into these issues remains a little bit elusive, slippery, like the ghosts it hides in plain sight.

And there ARE ghosts in these pages. If you know anything about Korea’s history, you’ll see straight away that Kang is moving towards uncovering the terrible fact of it.

In deep winter, Kyungha travels from Seoul to Jeju Island to the home of her friend, Inseon. She’s been hospitalised after an accident, and has asked Kyungha to make sure her pet bird is still alive and fed. But snowstorms thwart her journey and she struggles to reach the house.

This sets the tone for what’s to come: the snow buries both the physical and metaphysical. It buries truth. But it also facilitates dreams, memories, secrets passed down from Inseon’s mother to her daughter about the deeply shocking massacre that happened on the island some 70 years before. It turns out that Inseon has been painstakingly piecing together archival papers and reports to back up these stories.

What’s real and what’s not can be hard to discern but the atmosphere is chilling - not just because of the wintery forest the book is largely set in, but because the facts themselves ARE chilling, and delivered almost with a cold remove. The pain is in what is not said, in the emotions not expressed. To look a trauma of this magnitude in the eye sometimes takes restraint, otherwise hopelessness is sure to follow – we see this in part play out not with Inseon but with Kyungha in an earlier part of the book. And there is poetry in Kang’s images – beautiful, brutal poetry.

This is one to take your time with. The prose demands it anyway, but reading a book like this is a gift from a writer at the top of her game. A gift not just in craft, but in what it can teach us about the ugliest side of humanity and morality.

The book opens up with a chapter about a writer who is struggling with her own writing. Writing a novel about a massacre she is feeling secluded and absorbed by the research she's doing while also wanting to protect her family from it all. I loved this metanarrative, since Han Kang has previously written the novel "Human Acts" and are currently writing this particular one. This chapter is my absolute favourite part of the whole novel. It feels heart-breaking and real and like reading Kang's thoughts.

But this is not just a novel about a writer, this is also a story about her friendship to Inseon, Inseon's strained relationship to her mother, and that mother's struggles with her memories from the terrible massacre on Jeju Island in 1948.

The first chapter, as well as most of the media circling this novel, makes it seem like this novel will be centered around this massacre (similar to how "Human Acts" is constructed, weaving magical realism elements with history) but "We Do Not Part" is not structured in the same way.

The story takes a detour following the main character visiting her friend at the hospital and then trying to reach her friend's home on Jeju Island through a terrible snowstorm. Some might say that this detour is symbolic or that it is all connected but the detour is so long I almost forgot where we were going. Constantly expecting the story to arrive at it's "main" plot point made less appreciative of the journey, and the journey was so long filled with questions and musings, that when we arrived I had almost lost my interest.

I'm not a reader of poetry or magical realism so a lot of the symbolism and meaning around the journey so this structure makes it seem like two different novels to me.

I think the English translation would have benefited from a introduction or note from the author/translator explaining the context of the Jeju Island uprisings. This very much reads as a novel for someone already familiar with the history. I was lucky I had recently read another novel set on Jeju during these events.

For a reader of magical realism, poetry, and who enjoyed her earlier work this will be a wonderful tribute to Korean history.

The book opens up with a chapter about a writer who is struggling with her own writing. Writing a novel about a massacre she is feeling secluded and absorbed by the research she's doing while also wanting to protect her family from it all. I loved this metanarrative, since Han Kang has previously written the novel "Human Acts" and are currently writing this particular one. This chapter is my absolute favourite part of the whole novel. It feels heart-breaking and real and like reading Kang's thoughts.

But this is not just a novel about a writer, this is also a story about her friendship to Inseon, Inseon's strained relationship to her mother, and that mother's struggles with her memories from the terrible massacre on Jeju Island in 1948.

The first chapter, as well as most of the media circling this novel, makes it seem like this novel will be centered around this massacre (similar to how "Human Acts" is constructed, weaving magical realism elements with history) but "We Do Not Part" is not structured in the same way.

The story takes a detour following the main character visiting her friend at the hospital and then trying to reach her friend's home on Jeju Island through a terrible snowstorm. Some might say that this detour is symbolic or that it is all connected but the detour is so long I almost forgot where we were going. Constantly expecting the story to arrive at it's "main" plot point made less appreciative of the journey, and the journey was so long filled with questions and musings, that when we arrived I had almost lost my interest.

I'm not a reader of poetry or magical realism so a lot of the symbolism and meaning around the journey so this structure makes it seem like two different novels to me.

For a reader of magical realism, poetry, and who enjoyed her earlier work this will be a wonderful tribute to Korean history.

Like freshly fallen snow that becomes an avalanche
—
In spare and precise prose, the novel is a mosaic of stories, dreams and impressions, nothing ever quite what it is and nothing ever fully in sight. Set in a winter snowstorm on the southern island of Jeju, Kyungha is far from her own comforts, and her comfort zone itself a distant memory. In an unfamiliar place, her friend Inseon’s house, where Kyungha has pledged to look after Inseon’s budgie, Kyungha is met with ghosts of her own trauma and of a historical trauma, the massacre of 30,000 civilians as part of the lead up to the Korean War.

Like snowflakes settling, each piece of the novel lands to build a eulogy and a reckoning with history, and for Kyungha, breakdown and catharsis. Always wary of her incipient migraines, Kyungha is a classic Han narrator, unreliable even when narrating to herself, and threatened from all sides, but making her way regardless, her human spirit unconsciously undaunted in direct contradiction to her spoken desires.

This is, in short, a masterpiece, and evidence of why Han is a Nobel laureate. If I could, I would give this six stars.

Six stars, rounded down to five.

Trance-like, emotional, tip-toeing the line between dreams and reality. This book was the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and I would say that this is very appropriate given the way Han Kang encourages us to look unflinchingly, document and remember the darkness of our shared experiences, histories and the frailty of human life. Despite the heaviness, I still found this book to be optimistic, exploring themes of friendship and resilience. Admittedly, I was not aware of the Jeju 4.3 incident that the novel draws upon and so found these indirect themes of censorship and obfuscation of truth especially interesting. Having read Human Acts and The Vegetarian, I can see connections between her novels, but I think We Do Not Part is as good a place as any to start - maybe even the best yet! Dreamy, poetic and emotional prose. Expertly crafted, beautifully written, important reading. "Can the present help the past? Can the living save the dead?"

We Do Not Part is another excellent example of how Han Kang's writing reaches to the depths of hidden emotions and traumas and pulls them out for us to look at and reflect on. This is a book that touches on the Jeju Massacre in the middle of the 20th century, but is set decades after. It unflinchingly portrays the impact that violence and trauma has on a community, without ever glamorising violence or trying to get you to feel any particular way about it - it is less about the author trying to tell you how to feel and think than it is a piece of art that finds value in itself. This is something I love about Han Kang's writing in general - she writes things in a way that could be perceived as political, and in a sense IS political, yet she does so in a way that is so quintessentially novelistic, so human-centered, that it tells you the story of human acts rather than the straight-up analysis of those acts. That is not to say that you don't feel moved when reading about the main character's friend and her family's struggles under a violent regime! The empathy you feel reading this feels very authentic, as it's not based on your reaction to the stark facts of a brutal event in history, and it's not based on your preconceived notions of how you SHOULD feel about this event, but a direct reaction to the events you are reading about through the eyes of the fictional characters.

Thank you to Han Kang and NetGalley for this ARC!!

I’ve been an avid fan of Kang’s work for a few years now, each book I read of hers is both devastating and beautiful in equal measure and this book was no different. It reminded me very much of “DD’s Umbrella” by Hwang Jungeon, a perspective on a national tragedy that manages to encompass the emotions and experience of Korean citizens on both a deeply personal and national level. The prose was gorgeously written and poetic, as Kang’s usually is, but it has left me feeling a bit haunted.

I went into this not knowing what it was about based on how much I enjoyed The Vegetarian. This book was much darker than anything I was expecting and was about a period of history I knew nothing about prior to this book.

It was haunting, and the writing style chosen helped to capture that, especially with the continuous use of snow. It was also interesting to see snow being written this way, when it’s normally used for beauty.

It’s told in a slow, sometimes dreamlike way, to blend past and present and to talk about the way trauma still affects them. It was also about love, and a lot of what was written here will stay with me for a very long time.

Thank you to Netgalley and publishers for the eArc