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.

Just brilliant. After not enjoying Greek Lessons I was worried that this would similarly fall flat but the imagery and the writing in this was absolutely amazing and leaves you awe struck.

The main character of the book receives a phone call from a friend who has got into a carpentry accident and is in hospital in Seoul. She asks the narrator to travel to the island of Jeju to save her budgie who by the end of the day will have no food or water left and will surely die.

From the moment this set up finishes and the travel to Jeju begins, the book plunges you into a nightmare landscape as she battles through a hellish snowstorm continuously loses her way until she finds her friend’s abode. When she gets here, the book continues in this dream-like state as she begins to uncover the history of the island and reveals the horrific secrets of the Jeju massacre and the resulting deaths from the war that followed. We read about children being shot at, people digging through snow to find their dead relatives, and all this seems to happen right in front of the narrator as though the island itself it preserved in the nightmare of its own past. I loved how the friend’s injury at the beginning is almost a gateway to the real experience of her mother who had an identical injury during the time she lived on the island.

This was such a well constructed and fascinating book which contains a real emotional depth and striking imagery. I just loved how it was set up and how it felt like the narrator entered a bubble of the past, kind of reflective of the documentaries her friend had made in a hope to preserve the past and be able to learn from it. I would love to study this book in more depth as it was an incredible piece of writing and I’m so glad it triumphed over her previous novel.

I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, it sheds light on a significant yet often overlooked period in Korean history. Han Kang’s storytelling is both powerful and harrowing, sparking my curiosity and inspiring me to delve deeper into the subject. I also appreciated the unconventional structure, which kept me guessing about where the story would lead next.

On the other hand, I found the first half of the book slow and meandering, with many deviations that felt like they didn’t quite pay off. The surreal, nonlinear narrative—shifting between past and present, reality and dreams—added so many layers that it occasionally felt overwhelming and chaotic.

I enjoyed it but ultimately didn’t love it.

Thank you to Penguin for providing the ARC in exchange for a honest review.

This book is completely different from my normal diet of crime fiction and thrillers! That said there is still a storyline woven throughout the narrative which I could just about follow.
The writing is very evocative and although it is recounting the horrific massacre in Jeju in 1948 it somehow had a soothing affect. Like some other reviewers I also wasn’t sure for most of the book whether Kyungha was dreaming or lucid.

We Do Not Part is told from the perspective of a woman named Kyungha, an investigative journalist and writer based in Seoul. She lives alone and suffers from recurring nightmares that seem to symbolically intertwine natural elements and mass human suffering. She receives a message from her long-time friend and collaborator, a photographer, artist and filmmaker called Inseon. Inseon has been hospitalised following a woodworking accident, in which the tips of her fingers were sliced off (notably while working on a project suggested by Kyungha and inspired by her dreams, which she had asked her to stop).

In an attempt to recover the use of her digits, Inseon is subject to a torturous-sounding recovery programme involving regular injections into her hand that must be adminstered 24/7. When Kyungha visits, she is surprised to be asked to travel immediately to the remote Jeju Island where Inseon was based, in order to feed her pet bird. She nonetheless complies with the request, and arrives to find the island in the midst of an intense snowstorm, with transport impacted and only her memory of a previous visit to guide her to Inseon's home. The first half of the book focuses heavily on her seemingly doom-laden journey to try to rescue the bird, in which the elements seem to be conspiring against her. By the book's midpoint, it seems all is lost: while Kyungha makes it to the house, there is no heating and the cold seems unsurvivable. The bird, it seems, has not survived.

While the first section of the book has elements that are both specifically based in dreams and more generally 'dream-like', the book takes a more dramatic shift into this space in its second half. Kyungha awakes in the house to find the bird once more alive, and more confoundingly still, Inseon with her in the house, seemingly uninjured. With minimal questioning, Kyungha accepts this situation and is taken by Inseon on a guided history of her family and its history around and in the shadow of the 1948 Jeju massacre, in which government forces violently suppressed what they said was a left-wing insurgency based on the island.

According to estimates, around a fifth of the island's population, including civilian innocents, women and infants, were massacred on Jeju, with a rolling campaign of detentions and further executions over subsequent years. Like many related incidents in that era of Korean history, discussion was suppressed and facts only began to be made public decades later. In the book, Inseon's parents both survived the massacres by chance, and her mother in particular lived with that weight for the rest of their lives. We learn that her mother, recently passed away, was a key figure in campaigns to reveal the truth of the island's history, and that Inseon has taken on some of that work, both in the form of painstaking research and in translating some of the horrors into her art.

It's a really interesting and unusual framing device that Han deploys here. The book's second part takes us into the real substance of the book's purpose; a rich and detailed depiction of the horrific history of the island (and county), which is rooted very deliberately in real, specific events. And yet we are ostensibly learning about this reality through a strangely unreal scenario. If we're interested in figuring out what is 'happening' to Kyungha in this section, we may speculate that she is on some kind of boundary of consciousness, working through an understanding of what motivated her friend and in the process piecing together ever-deeper and darker elements of her family's history; or that she's consciously awake and engaged in the same process more physically, trawling through Inseon's boxes of documents while (as a result?) having some kind of breakdown in which she invokes her friend's spirit as a kind of consolatory guide.

Han leaves all of this deliberately open, and it ultimately doesn't matter. The blizzard in which Kyungha is caught both blankets out the present-day reality and brings with it a connection to a past that has been erased and is now resurfacing. It's a really storytelling sleight of hand that foregrounds questions of how atrocities can be covered up, made 'unreal' and memories altered and 'erased' (Inseon's mother's dementia is another metaphorical nod to this) and the struggles (political, journalistic, artistic) that try to work to recover some of that lost truth.

It's clearly a masterful book and its combination of immensely heavy subject matter and beautifully constructed prose, in which the lightness and fragility of nature (snowflakes, bird's wings) act as counterbalances to that historical weight, make it very evident why Han is now a Nobel Laureate. At times, I found the dream-like nature a little too wispy and hard to hold onto, and early on questioned whether I'd get on with it as a result (I am one of those people who really does not enjoy hearing about others' dreams). However, the way the whole of the book comes together to render that insubstantiality somehow deeply meaningful was impressive and powerful.

(9/10)

I'm not sure that, at almost any point in this book after the arrival at Jeju island, I knew what was going on. But, it is a testament to Kang's writing, that even with no clue what was real and what wasn't, this is still an incredibly powerful, moving, and altogether beautiful book.

I know very little about the history of South Korea, and even less about the history of jeju island. This book does an incredible job of explaining the atrocities that took place from the April uprising onwards, but captures them in the tale of survivors. Of escapees and relatives, desperately seeking for their family, either in flesh or in bone.

This story makes you question and reconsider family and relationships. How much do we really know about what our parents and grandparents have been through.

I was left with many questions, not least of which being - is Ama actually alive?

Han Kang is a complete genius when it comes to creating scenery and atmospheres that completely absorb the reader. During the scenes of snow and struggles against the elements, I could feel every sense that she described and I felt I was right there with the characters.

This book, like Kang’s others, starts as one thing and ends as something completely different. A story of two friends spans into something more sinister and more beautiful.

We Do Not Part is an important novel about a time in Korean history that is not talked about enough. It is harrowing and it is dark, and Kang dealt with the subject matter so masterfully. Her narrative voice is so strong that even when it gets hard, you still have to go on. Kang was once blacklisted in South Korea due to one of her earlier novels, ‘Human Acts’ but Kang has persevered and continues to write about parts of history many would wish to have hidden. Through her devotion to writing about the realities of humanity and the struggles that come along with it, she has yet again written another powerful and timely novel. It is no wonder Kang won a Novel Prize for literature.

I will forever be in awe of Han Kang and her writing. I have yet to find a book of hers I did not devour and adore and take with me after reading. This novel is definitely one that is going to stay with me forever, I still cannot shake the chill Kang’s descriptions.

This is a novel that everyone needs to read.

I previously read a couple of Han Kang’s works in English, and I struggled to get into them. Han Kang tends to lend a certain amount of hidden meaning in her choice of words as well as adding ambiguous layers as to who exactly is narrating the story. She produces some very complex pieces that require effort to decode. However, after Han Kang won the Noble Prize for Literature, I felt I should come back to reassess her work by reading this newest title.
Instantly, echoes of her previous titles are here again. We are first plunged into a dream that is a throwback to Human Acts, and I wondered if I would be dragged through the Gwangju massacre tragedy again. I was to a certain extent. But, then, the horrible scenes are interspersed by quite ordinary biographical details, and I actually found Han Kang’s account of her everyday life and the positioning of herself in her own story more appealing. I definitely came away with more insight into Han Kang as a person and a writer.
We learn of the toll that writing Human Acts took on her. Following the publication of that book, she seemed to enter an exhausted, depressive state, haunted by visions of what happened in Gwangju. She also gives an account of when her friend lost some fingers in an accident. I guess the title refers to the author not being able to fully separate herself from both distant and present events and people, and the same could apply to all of us. The events are largely non-cheerful, so it’s not particularly an uplifting read.
If you are into modern Korean literature, including works by Han Kang, then you will find this book interesting. Otherwise, I think it might be difficult to appreciate.

How to describe this book? It was confusing, but I quite enjoyed the confusion which I assume was deliberate. This book also has a structure that's very different to anything I've read before. The friendship between the two women is beautifully depicted.

It's also highlighted incidents in history, the Jeju massacre that I knew nothing about, and from this book's information it seems a lot is unresolved. It is harrowing content. The way the author shows the effects of inherited trauma through the generations was hauntingly accurate. I particularly related to the scenes of dementia bringing up these memories.

A tough read and a beautiful read and one I'll revisit at some point

Thank you to Netgalley, the author and publisher for a free copy in exchange for an honest review

As a massive fan of Han Kang's writings We Do Not Part was a great addition to her other works, for me it feels like a book that fits the same genre as Human Acts in regards to the historical references to the horrors of war (in this case the Jeju massacre of 1948) and like that novel it feels like a particularly raw reflection on the horrors and atrocities humans can and do commit to others and the cost faced by those survive such horrors, as well as the generational scars and impact, which can be seen especially in this novel in the character Inseon whose injury feels as much a metaphor to her mother's experience of finding the body of her elder sister in the snow.

A fascinating read and deeply thought provoking on the broader theme of loss and generational trauma.

Many thanks for the e-ARC Netgalley & Penguin.

I loved "The Vegetarian "by Han Kang but struggled with "Greek Lessons" and it's cold prose. "We Do Not Part" is a change in tone again and I really respect how Han Kang is unafraid to experiment and go in unexpected directions after the success of The Vegetarian. We Do Not Part is a book of two halves. In the first section Ineson is hospitalised and has no one to take care of her pet bird, as a last resort she contacts her old friend Kyungha who makes a long arduous journey by plane and through a snow storm to reach Ineson's flat and feed the bird. In the flat whilst looking through books and papers, Kyungha discovers that Ineson's mother is a survivor of the massacre that followed the Jeju uprising in 1940, in which many people were slaughtered by the US-backed South Korean government forces and which lead them on a journey back to the island.

I think the first section of the book would make a lovely novella and the second a book in its own right as they felt a bit separate in tone to me. I had not heard of the Jeju uprising so I did learn some new history. I thought that some of the segues and "flights of fancy" distracted form the main storyline but I loved the motif of weather and how it impacts emotions very effective.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher Penguin UK, for giving me access to this book's ARC in exchange for my honest opinion!

Just like in Human Acts, Han Kang once again blends reality and fiction to ensure another tragic period in Korean history is not forgotten. In this book, we follow the relationship between two friends through a highly fragmented and confusing narrative in the present, haunted by the Jeju Island massacre of the past. This historical event, which led to the division of North and South Korea after Japanese occupation, intertwines with the lives of Kyungha and Inseon in a tone that shifts between dream and nightmare—at times, making it quite difficult to follow.

“Sometimes, with some dreams, you awake and sense that the dream is ongoing elsewhere. This dream is like that.”

“I placed my hand over the photo of the bones. Over people who no longer had eyes or tongues. Over people whose organs and muscles had rotted away! Over what was no longer human - no. Over what remained human even now.”

Despite Kang’s unique ability to balance brutality and fragility so well (which has made her one of my favorite authors), I can’t give We Do Not Part five stars. Unfortunately, the surrealist elements made the narrative quite chaotic, to the point where I often couldn’t tell which character was speaking, what was actually happening, or whether it was about the present or the past. Because of this, I felt a barrier between myself and the text, which prevented me from experiencing the intended level of empathy—especially given such sensitive themes that usually move me deeply.

Even so, I believe it’s a must-read for those who have already explored Kang’s other works. It’s a profound study of the human condition, showing that even after witnessing traumatic events, after all the pain, suffering, and despair, after our vulnerability, the harsh winters of life, and the deep shadows of the past—it is possible to have hope. It is possible not only to survive but to truly live.

“I had not reconciled with life, but I had to resume living.”

“I knew that was where my mum had also found herself. Waking from a nightmare, splashing water on my face and gazing at the mirror, I saw the same persistent quality in my features that had branded hers. What astounded me was the sun's rays, that they returned each day. Steeped in the afterimage of my dreams, I would walk to the woods and find their brutally beautiful light penetrating the foliage and creating thousands upon thousands of light drops.”

We Do Not Part is one of the most enchanting and haunting novels I have ever stumbled across. The thematic concerns of pain, intergenerational trauma, and ultimately connection are all immediately clear with the inciting event of carpenter Inseon losing two fingertips. Our narrator Kyungha rushes to her aid, not entirely grasping the gravity of the situation. Tasked with saving Inseon’s beloved pet bird, Ama, a seemingly simple favour morphs into a treacherous journey to Jeju Island in a snowstorm that threatens Kyungha and Ama’s lives. In a dreamlike sequence, readers are forced to accept Keat’s concept of negative capability, whereby you must embrace uncertainty without seeking answers. This Kafkaesque approach to storytelling is quintessential Kang and I encourage you to sit with the confusion and discomfort. Not because it will eventually be resolved, because it won’t; if you want a clean narrative, Kang is not your author of choice. Sit with the confusion because this imbues the nature of trauma, memory, and the uncertainty between life and death. The friendship between Inseon and Kyungha is one of the only things to be sure of throughout the whole novel; their connection transcends planes of existence.

In the hospital, Inseon is injected with needles every 3 minutes to make sure her once-severed nerves stay intact. This premise functions as a demand for the reading of this novel. Every 3 minutes (give or take), we are exposed to something cruel, something shocking, something intended to make us feel alive and check that our humanity remains responsive. We must keep prodding our emotions to prevent desensitisation. Inseon and Kyungha’s art project is living evidence of this; they seek to honour the past in order to better understand their present.

Pairing this rhythmic pinprick with the intertextual layering of the Jeju massacre, Kang overlays the presence of haunting timelines in a way that demands recognition. This prolonged pain and censorship spills into the immediate, represented by poignant symbols like trees, snow, and birds, clear favourites used throughout Kang's novels. The ripples of the massacre long permeate temporal boundaries through the power of collective memory, further asserting that we can never stop pressing these pain points. Kang emphasises that facing history is the only way to keep our severed, disjointed nerves alive.