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 The historical references also become very explicit and while it is undoubtedly important to highlight the history and massacres it began to read like a history account rather than a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

We Do Not Part is a beautifully haunting exploration of grief, memory, and human connection. Han Kang’s prose is delicate yet deeply affecting, weaving together fragmented narratives that blur the line between reality and dream. Her writing lingers like an echo, soft but impossible to ignore. This is not a story of resolution, but of absence and the ways love and loss become inseparable. Poetic, meditative, and quietly devastating, We Do Not Part is another stunning work from one of the most powerful literary voices of our time.

Han Kang's book showcases her remarkable writing talent and presents a unique voice that sets it apart from her earlier works. Through vivid imagery and delicate metaphors, she captures the sorrow experienced by survivors, their descendants, and those who have passed away. The narratives emerge from the shadows, shedding light on the profound effects of government censorship. In this context, the resistance to forgetting evolves into an act of love and duty towards the living. This book is a brilliant read for anyone who appreciates it Kang's work.

The novel opens with a haunting scene that the narrator wonders is a graveyard. It is ambiguous and yet the voice tells us that she is seeing nightmares of a massacre in a place referenced as G ––, which is the topic of the protagonist Kyungha's published book. She recalls "sparse snow" and "black tree trunks jutt[ing] from the earth ... like a crowd of people" which may bring images of WWI trenches to mind, but this is a shoreline with the sea "crashing in". At odds with the snow, what also comes to mind in reading "the thicket of black trees" and "rising water", is the eeriness of places like the Atchafalaya River Basin Swamp between Texas and Louisiana, which does weirdly correspond since flashback scenes are from a subtropical summer in Seoul, when the reader hears stark descriptions of humidity and heat.

Han Kang welcomes the reader with dreamy visions of the forests of Jeju island that surround Kyungha who is called to her old friend Inseon's hospital bedside in Seoul with the message "Can you come right away?" This is only the starting point for her journey.

The relationship between Kyungha-ya and Inseon-ah, is a powerful one. The narrator's conveyal of her connection to Inseon as a fellow artist, in their work together for a magazine, her understanding and the appreciation of Inseon's mother's tragic illness, is smoothly embedded into Kyungha's growing concern about what accident might have befallen her friend and why she is needed to travel to Jeju island for her friend.

Inseon's incident is a gruesome one. The way she explains it to Kyungha from her hospital bed is beautifully explicit and will draw visceral images directly to you. Squeamish readers, watch out!

However, the information conveyed through the story about amputated limbs, the (phantom) pain, the debate about choices, the aftercare, and the intricacies of reconstructive surgery for detached limbs is utterly absorbing. I loved it.

And then there's the snow, which will play with your mind; with its pure whiteness and ability to transpose emotions from one place to another, and one mood to another.

"The strangest thing, snow, Inseon said in a whisper I could barely hear."

And the collaborative photography project the two girls plan and prepare is Han Kang's fascinating tool for bringing together her story threads. In fact the structure and intermittent sections of the narrative that fit with the theme of photography are also brilliant, working to keep the reader right there with Inseon the patient and her friend Kyungha.

Inseon's delicate white bird left at home and in need of Kyungha's care opens up another swathe of thought related to how we think about protecting others, the hidden tragedies that can occur during wars and similar regimes that documented history can forget and have forgotten, as well as the fragility that comes before death.

"You have to keep an eye on them even when they look fine./Birds will pretend like nothing's wrong, no matter how much pain they're in. They instinctively endure and hide pain to avoid being targeted by predators. By the time they fall off their perch, it's too late."

Many thanks to NetGalley and Hogarth.
@francisgilbert_bookclub

#readabitofeverything #hankang #wedonotpart #worksintranslation #workintranslation #southkoreanauthors #nobelprizewinner #eyaewon #paigeaniyahmorris #birdimagery #snowimagery #friendshipinliterature #humanmind #dreamscapes

Having read and been moved by The Vegetarian I couldn't wait to read this book. I was not disappointed.. It is so emotional yet tranquil in its telling. Reading descriptions of snow falling is akin to meditating,Unbelievable. The grit of the story for me was the telling of the Jeju massacre and its profound effect on Inseon and her family Their are so many themes within this story about friendship,loyalty,resilience and above all love. An incredible book

Now don't think that I remembered this term without having to Google it, but We Do Not Part reminded me of some theories that Eastern Asian storytelling follows different structures than Western. Specifically Kishōtenketsu, describes a style of progress that replaces rising tension and eventual resolution with a sort of 'forever tension' stories that don't fall neatly into place but more capture or explore ongoing tensions.

Which is a way to introduce We Do Not Part as a strange (but not in a bad way) sort of story. The narration is really quite different, while our MC does go through some extreme, even borderline comical but deadly situations, Inseon's character is who we really explore. It creates quite a strange effect in reading and I have to confess that I incorrectly guessed that this book was going to have a Sixth Sense type twist because our MC seems so strangely absent and ghostlike in development that I thought they might indeed be a sort of poltergeist.

Other than my own mistakes, the one thing that stands out about this book is the vivid writing. I love snowy wintery settings and the prose on the pages of this book practically dragged me into the scenes, I love writing like this and even though there might not have been a classic plot for this story there is no doubt every scene will sit with you for some time.

Thanks to Netgalley for this advance copy

We Do Not Part was such an atmospheric read, ideal to hunker down with on a stormy winters night. We follow two characters who have been friends for years, both with their own relationship to the Korean War of the early 1950s. While their story gets increasing foggy and has you questioning what's real and what's not, we are given snippets of Inseon's mother's life and experience as a child in 1950 during the war.

There were some really great ideas in this book, however I'm not sure all of them worked for me. I found myself tuning out sometimes and needing to go back to reread passages (which doesn't usually happen for me). I think perhaps this was due to the constant back and forth between time periods and perspectives. The overall structure just felt a bit off for me. Nevertheless I've found myself thinking a lot about this novel since finishing it.

There are scenes in this book where we follow the characters hiking through a snowstorm, freezing and wet and disoriented, and that's exactly what it feels like to read this book. I wish the structure was a little different, as that's what I think is preventing this book from being a new favourite, but it may just be a case of the right book at the wrong time.

I am not usually on top of reading the latest Nobel prize winner's books, but in the case of Han Kang, I had already had her books on my list before. In the past two months I've read two books by her, The Vegetarian and, now, We Do Not Part. And I have to say that although I appreciated The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part hit me in a completely different way. Thanks to Penguin, Hamish Hamilton, and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

We Do Not Part is a book about history and trauma, about how trauma gets passed down, even silently, through generations, and about how, even without you being aware of it, you may be carrying it with you. In this book, Han Kang addresses a part of Korean history I was unaware of, specifically the Jeju Uprising (April 1948 - May 1949) and the Bodo League Massacre and Gyeongsan Cobalt Mine Massacre that followed. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans, men, women, young children, babies, and elderly, died during these massacres and it took decades for the full truth to emerge about it and for the bereaved to receive recognition. As such, violence and pain reverberate throughout We Do Not Part, which does not make it an easy read. Not only are there detailed descriptions of war crimes, torture, and violence, but it is also made clear how a trauma like this leaves traces throughout a people and country. Both main characters in the book, Kyungha and Inseon, are haunted in different ways by the past. For Kyungha, she is followed by horrid dreams ever since writing a book about a massacre, which may or may not have led to the depression she is currently experiencing. Inseon, meanwhile, comes from Jeju and her family was deeply marked by the horrors they experienced. As an adult, Inseon is uncovering this history, while coming to terms with her own ideas of her parents. I am German and, in a weird way, I recognised certain elements of Han Kang's discussion of history and trauma in the way I deal with my country's past. What happened in the places I live, the horrors that were committed there, it leaves traces I still encounter every day through memorial plaques or stories that are shared. Of course the Holocaust and Nazi regime are very different from the massacres and regime of Korea in the 1940's and '50s, but this heavy burden of the past, of knowingly being somewhere where evil happened, it's a shadow I recognise and whose weight is almost unbearable at times. Somehow, in We Do Not Part, Han Kang manages to both shine a stark, unflinching light onto these horrors, while grasping the flickering, shadowed perspective of trauma, which can't bear to look back but is forced to every time.

We Do Not Part is split into three parts, ironically, called 'I. Bird', 'II. Night', and 'III. Flame'. The novel is largely told through Kyungha's perspective, especially in the first part. She is living in Seoul, although you could hardly call it living. Kyungha is haunted by dreams of trees, snow, graves, and floods, ever since writing a book about a massacre and now she is trying to write a final will. She is roused, however, when her friend Inseon asks her to come to the hospital, where she is currently recovering after an accident. Inseon was a photographer and documentary filmmaker, until she returned to Jeju Island to look after her ageing mother. Inseon needs Kyungha to go to Jeju immediately, to give her bird water because otherwise she will die. And so Kyungha lands on Jeju as an epic snow storm takes over the island. The whole of We Do Not Part, arguably, takes place over two or so days, as Kyungha heads to Jeju, struggles to Inseon's house, and there has to deal with the past of Inseon's family, their experiences during the Jeju Uprising and the following massacres, and how this shaped both Inseon and herself. What of the latter two parts of the novel is "real" and what is a dream hardly matters. We Do Not Part becomes at once a novel about the horrors of the past and a novel about the strength of friendship. This may sound cliche and it is important to know that it is not as if friendship saves the day in We Do Not Part. Rather, Han Kang manages to depict this quiet resilience you can find in friendship, which allows you to face the darkest parts of yourself and history, the things you fear but know are there, which allows you to share a burden, to gaze into the abyss together and feel a little less alone in the face of it. Without this core friendship, and the insights we get into it, We Do Not Part would have been a deeply depressing novel, but through it, Han Kang almost manages to shine a light onto how we might be able to cope with the horrors of the past. By dragging it into the light, looking at it together, and being there with one another.

As I mentioned above, I read The Vegetarian at the end of 2024. I had heard so much about the book that my expectations were quite high, but I was not prepared for the dreamlike oddness of the book, the distance it took from its purported main character. I think I need to reread it at some point. Because of this experience, I went into We Do Not Part a little less sure of whether Han Kang's writing worked for me. And yet, it gripped me almost immediately in a way The Vegetarian hadn't. We Do Not Part is a lyrical, dreamlike book as well, but here it reflects the mindset of trauma in a way that eases the reader into the experience. In their review on We Do Not Part, Roman Clodia talked about the the varied use of symbolism, especially the snow and fingers, which come to mean different things, and about how these 'sorts of dualities of imagery give a gorgeous coherence to the book'. This kind of crystalised for me what worked so well about We Do Not Part, which is that this slow layering of symbols and ideas functions almost like the snow in the novel itself. The first few gentle snowflakes of snow can be ignored or looked past, but once it comes down heavy that softness becomes heavy and oppressive. Han Kang builds up slowly to the absolute horror of the historical events We Do Not Part focuses on until, in the end, much like Kyungha and Inseon, you cannot escape it and have to face it. It is a slow path, but by the end, Kyungha and Inseon were people to me, rather than characters, and people I cared very deeply about. I also think e. yaewon/이예원 and Paige Aniyah Morris did an excellent job translating the book. While, of course, I don't know how the Korean read, I definitely got a sense of the lyricism and dreamlike quality Han Kang must have intended for this book.

We Do Not Part is a stunning and painful book, which uncovers a period of history we really all should know more about. It is a novel about pain and the worst kinds of things that can be done, but it is also about how we look at these things unflinchingly, even if it hurts. While it isn't a "how to deal with trauma" book, it is the kind of book that might be able to give you a language for the things you are dealing with.

Kangs books is one of the creepiest I know. Her way of getting to to the inner of things and almost flaking out the most delicate of every character is more creepy than a ghost story. This is a must-read! Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for a chance to read this eARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.