One of those books that feels impossible to give an arbitrary rating to. On the one hand, Kang has written an incredibly deft novel about the Jeju Massacre in 1948, on the other, she has written an abstract novel that reads like sand falling through your fingers. Considering the novel's 400 page weight, there's not much to be said about where the pages go: a large swathe of the novel details the narrator waiting at a bus stop in a snowstorm, then walking through the snow, in the attempt to save her friend's budgie. The final hundred pages or so details the dreamlike investigation into her friend's family history and the Jeju Uprising. It is a book full of quiet but poignant images: a budgie hushing as soon as a cover is thrown over its cage, endless snowfall, shadows moving on walls, logs of wood painted black, a bus crawling through the snowstorm, missing fingers... These images all drift, like a snowstorm itself, and carry us through the incredibly weightless narrative. Like the movie planned but never made, the novel reads like an assortment of slides or images, hauntingly quiet, that flicker before your eyes. I can't say I 'liked' the book; I was unnerved by it, sometimes confused by it, but ultimately impressed by Kang's ability to write a novel about this diabolical historical event in a seemingly directionless and airy narrative. What persists in my mind most of all are the black logs standing in the snow, the shadows on the walls and the silencing of a bird.

Thank you to Penguin for the advance copy for review. We Do Not Part is published in English in the UK in February 2025.

The story it's dark and in some parts quite graphic but it's all part of the story. The writing style is beautiful and it just pulls you in the story and it haunts you.

Interesting and riveting.

Going to be the subject of my February newsletter to coincide with the release. I will share that when it is published.

Absolutely excellent book, and Han Kang just keeps on shining. Deeply thematic and made me think a lot

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for my ARC.

This is my second Han Kang novel, and I am still undecided if her work is for me, having previously read Greek Lessons and feeling not much at all. Don't get me wrong, the writing is gorgeous, I just feel like a lot of it goes over my head and can sometimes be difficult to follow. I am very undecided about this book personally, but I know this will be right up a lot of people's streets.

Like the first time I had kimchi, I tried it but didn't love it. I was fortunate to read an advanced copy of *We Do Not Part* by Han Kang. This was my first experience with Korean literature. I enjoyed recognizing the overlapping sentiments and the crazy, spontaneous things we do for our loved ones. I also appreciated learning about an important period in Korean history and some of the events that occurred on Jeju Island. However, the style of the book began to feel too artistic for me. The transitions were designed to feel ethereal and ghostly, but they came across as overly nebulous and whimsical. Ultimately, it was interesting but not to my taste.

Nobel Prize winner returns with "We Do Not Part," a fictionalised examination of the horrors of the Jeju Massacre. Kang tells the story of the massacre through the friendship of two women: Kyungha and Incheon who suffers in the hospital after her fingers are sliced off. She asks Kyungha to check on her bird who has been left alone. Through Kyungha's journey back to Incheon's home, Kang slowly unfurls the connection between the incomprehensible cruelty of the massacre and its aftermath with current day events.

The novel exhibits Kang's humanistic approach to her characters and the story. Kyungha wants to make sense of Incheon's family history, and how generations of violence are visited upon the present. Kyungha has to retrace Incheon's footsteps, and discover/assemble all the parts of Incheon's family history. The Korean families on Jeju Island are burdened with the cruelty and viciousness of the past, and the families must cope with never knowing what has happened to their loved ones. They are left to go on with their lives, but they remain stuck in the past because the past can rarely be resolved.

Kang explores how narratives are created around these horrific events. The governments want to pretend they didn't happen, and the families have to concoct narratives of hope because they do not want to believe that their family members have been kidnapped, tortured, and/or murdered. As a filmmaker, Incheon uses film to understand the meaning behind suffering, war, and the emotional toll of witnessing such events. She also must come to terms with her relationship with her mother, and how the war and massacre impacted their bond.

The novel is ultimately about reclaiming the past and the lost loved one who never got to decide the end to their story. It's about reconciling one's own future with those relatives who had no future. Han Kang's "We Do Not Part" is a beautifully written and emotionally shattering journey through the generations of victims who suffered and continue to suffer because of systematic and intentional violence.

I read Han Kang’s The Vegetarian a good few years ago, and I remember being haunted by it long after I’d finished it, even if the finer details of the plot now evade me. As such, I was delighted to receive an advanced reading copy of We Do Not Part, especially after the author’s recent Nobel Prize win: a well-deserved recognition of her unique voice in contemporary literature. I finished the book a few days ago, and honestly, I’m still contemplating how I feel about it. Perhaps this is the point?

For me, We Do Not Part was a book of two halves. On one hand, Kang’s writing is exquisite: delicate and immersive, with a quiet strength that’s wonderfully captured by translators e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. I enjoyed the small, poignant details that paint the daily existence of two women living in mainland Korea and on Jeju Island. Each setting feels rich, and Kang’s eye for detail breathes life to these places. The prose itself is stunning and was what ultimately kept me reading on even when the plot lost me.

While I was completely drawn in by the writing, I found the plot disappointing. There are a number of threads - like the recurring imagery of birds, or the enigmatic old woman at the bus stop - that felt like they were meant to signify something profound, but their purpose ultimately flew over my head (pun not intended). Perhaps these were metaphors for aspects of grief, or symbols tied to Korean folklore or history, but they were too ambiguous for me to make sense of and left me feeling a bit frustrated and confused. I kept waiting for these elements to reveal themselves and offer some kind of revelation or resolution, but they remained unresolved.


The book’s latter half shifts focus to the Jeju Island uprisings and the massacres that ensued, and here, Kang’s writing is haunting, explicit and completely heartbreaking. She conveys the weight of this historical trauma with the same precision and care that defines her work, and there are passages that are extremely powerful. That being said, I couldn’t quite see how they served the novel’s larger narrative. To me, it felt like two separate books: one exploring female friendship and memory, and another that details the violent history of Jeju (perhaps this should have been a non-fiction book instead?). Both stories are compelling, but I’m not sure they came together cohesively, and the combination left me feeling flat.

There’s no doubt that Han Kang is a masterful writer, and her Nobel Prize is a testament to her literary prowess and bravery in tackling difficult subjects. Her prose alone makes We Do Not Part worth the read. Sadly, for me, this novel missed the mark, perhaps by trying to do too much in too short a space.

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Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley UK for the advanced reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

When Inseon has an accident in her isolated home, she's lucky to survive the blood loss and make it to a hospital in Seoul. From there she contacts Kyungha, the narrator of this story, and sends her on a mission to rescue Ama - Inseon's pet bird.
What follows is the tender unravelling of a story - a dark history that haunts both Inseon and Kyungha, and the deepening link between the pair, reinforced by shared trauma.

This novel was both dark and gruesome, with graphic detail of death and injury, whilst also being lyrical and poetic. A difficult balance to strike but Han Kang manages it so well. It's hard to say much more without giving away too much...

Although this isn't my usual genre to read, I still thoroughly enjoyed the book, even though some parts were challenging to process and complicated to understand the timeline and the narrator. I think that knowing some historical context would have helped a lot with this though. If you enjoyed The Vegetarian, you're sure to like this one too.

I loved The Vegetarian and didn’t think I’d find anything quite so unique again but I was wrong! This was absolutely perfect in every way and I am going to use this as part of my students curriculum! Fast becoming my favourite author now! Brilliant!

Kang blends the atmospheric imagery of The White Book with the charged emotions of Human Acts in this elegiac exploration of Jeju 4:3 and its aftermath.

The stark imagery has a filmic quality, and every scene is vividly rendered. There is an immediacy to Han Kang's prose which makes you feel as if you're right there in the snow-drenched Jeju countryside, even if - with apparitions looming out of the dark and the past as immediate as the present - you are not quite sure what is real and what is not.

Intense and evocative, We Do Not Part is a haunting read.

We Do Not Part by Han Kang is a haunting and lyrical read set in contemporary South Korea. The novel begins as we follow Kyungha, who travels from the city of Seoul to the forests of Jeju Island, and the home of her friend Inseon. Her friend has been hospitalised following an accident in her workshop and she calls Kyungha to beg her to visit and save her beloved pet bird. This mission sets Kyungha out on a journey towards a snowstorm and a surprising decent into darkness and memory. The long-buried secrets of Inseon’s family history await, discovered in dreams and visions, that include the terrible massacre that took place on the island seventy years earlier. It is a novel of friendship, connection, imagination and both remembering and forgetting. The prose is beautiful, tender and all the sharper for its clarity. The book is carefully paced and felt realistic in its portrayal of how the past and its secrets are slowly revealed and passed between generations. Kyungha and Inseon are both artists and documentarians looking to tell and record the stories of the past and this book felt like a perfect construction of their vision and narratives. Heartbreaking and fantastical, Han Kang is a skilled and powerful writer and this book is a beautiful translation of her work 4.25 Stars ✨.

Han Kang, now globally famous following her Nobel Prize Award, has this new novel, beautifully written, full of quiet devastation, to show the English speaking world why she deserved the Nobel.

We Do Not Part is a novel which faces tragedy head-on, in lyrical, precise prose. It is haunting in it's excavation of massacres, of Korea's troubled past, but takes times to find moments of beauty too. If you have read her previous novels, especially Human Acts, you will know how Han Kang can say multitudes with just a few short, sharp sentences. She wields that scalpel many times here. This is a vital novel, challenging at times, but truly rewarding.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

Firstly thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an advance copy of this book in return for my honest opinion. After reading The Vegetarian I was really grateful to receive this book to see how I got on with another one of her novels.

However I really struggled to get into it and found at only 15% I had to DNF it. I found the writing a little hard to get on with however I would willingly give it another chance when the book is published and available in stores. I was trying to read it on my Kindle and the numbers at the end of each line weee really off putting.

Thank you Net Galley for the arc.

This book was another beautifully touching addition to the Han Kangs roster of books. I loved the friendship between Inseon and Kyungha, it was tender and relatable. The book was thought provoking and the subject matters were handled with care and raw emotion that I found myself crying more times than I expected.

I got a copy of this through NetGalley so was very excited to have an early read. I always find Han Kang books challenging on an intellectual level so this was no different. What she also does beautifully though is retain the narrative element of the book. At the end of the day there is a story and one you become invested in very quickly.

Han Kang's latest book is profound and extraordinary, she is a deserving Nobel Prize winner, as she proves here. It is a razor sharp, mesmerising, poetic and lyrical exposure of the darkest side of humanity, the massacres carried out in the rabid hunt for 'communists', which the organisers and perpetrators would have wanted buried and unacknowledged in South Korea, where they are supported by the US. There is immense power in this haunting and harrowing tragedies, an anguished history and storytelling, the beautifully crafted language, surreal tones of the dream like state, we see that nothing and no-one disappears, in this unsettled and disturbing land of ghosts, birds, trees, silence, secrets, desperation, and snow with its capacity to obliterate and threaten life, the conscience and the conscious, the annihilation and terrors go deep, with the killing even of children,

Kang looks the past head on, straight in the eye, seeing and expressing the complexities of the human psyche, shining a much needed light on the nature of intergenerational trauma, and the inescapable repercussions that follow. Kyungha goes to visit her friend, Inseon, in a Seoul hospital after an accident chopping wood whilst working on her art installation. Not wanting her pet bird to die, Inseon asks Kyungha to ensure it does not die of starvation in her home on Jeju island. Caught in a snowstorm, facing dangers, Kyungha stumbles unexpectedly on the nation's and her friend's darkest history, resulting in the documentation, and unearthing of memories, that begin to place value on the huge numbers of lives lost and scarred.

Kang holds glimmers of hope amidst the despair, with her focus on human connections, love, friendship, to move towards find some degree of peace, through memorialisation, art, memories, and the uncovering of truth, South Korea's real political history and what governments are willing to do to its people. What humans can do to other human beings can be sickening, an agonising nightmare unfortunately the human race repeats time and time again, with its inability to learn nothing apparently from history, something sadly illustrated by our contemporary world. This is not a book you will forget in a hurry, I can feel its insistent call to revisit again already. I strongly urge readers who have never encountered Kang to try this, you will not regret it. Highly recommended. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

Whenever I bring up Human Acts, most of the people I talk are surprised to hear that South Korea had, until very recently, a brutal history of suppression and violence against its own people. Hundreds of thousands were massacred by successive South Korean governments during and since the Korean War. Westerners often identify that kind of violence with North Korea, and, especially in the age of K-Pop and K-Dramas, it is hard to reconcile the glitzy image of the country with the sort of brutality Han Kang's books masterfully bear witness to.

We Do Not Part is a spiritual successor to Human Acts. It focuses on the afterlives of the massacres in Jeju Island during the 1948-49 uprising. Similar to Human Acts, Han Kang employs an innovative structure, but unlike Human Acts, the narrator and the narrative are not directly related to the uprising. The narrator is an author who has recently researched and written a book about a different uprising. Kyungha, the narrator, is suffering from the aftershocks of having experienced the traumas of the event they were writing about as a part of the writing process. Her friend Inseon experiences a terrible accident, and as a result her house in a remote part of Jeju is left unattended. Inseon asks Kyungha to immediately go there and care for her pet bird, who would die without a human looking after it.

The first half of the book follows Kyungha's meticulously written journey to Jeju through an enormous snowstorm. There is very little direct engagement with the main themes of the book in the first half. Han Kang masterfully writes quite an abstract narrative, weaving together the themes of dread, duty and fate. The second half confronts the Jeju uprising much more directly, as we follow Inseon's methodical research into her family's story. Part II reads almost like a journalistic investigation, providing a contrast with Part I, reminiscent of an arthouse film. The narrative is held together by a sense of foreboding and the haunting setting of the empty remote house. The novel really reminded me of Pedro Paramo: we follow an outsider coming into a deserted remote location possessed by its brutal past, everyone we meet might be dead already and the weather - sweltering heat in Pedro Paramo and the snowstorm in We Do Not Part - is a character in itself.

We Do Not Part is a novel about memory and human brutality. Han Kang revisits some of the themes of Human Acts, such as questioning who the memories belong to, critiquing extractive practices of interviewers, documentary filmmakers and oral historians, and discussing just how long a shadow events of the past can have. Folliwng Han Kang's Nobel Prize this year, many commentators were quick to point out that Korea ostracised Han Kang and now tries to reclaim her as a national hero, and having read We Do Not Part and Human Acts I can see why the government and the society at large would want to silence Kang's voice. She is absolutely unflinching in recovering the stories of the oppressed and questioning many narratives of Korean identity.

In We Do Not Part, one of the side plots concerns Inseon's documentary about atrocities in Vietnam committed by Korean soldiers fighting for the USA. In a memorable scene, Inseon, a Korean documentary maker, visits a remote village in Vietnam trying to interview survivors of sexual assault committed by Korean soldiers. Now an elderly woman, the survivor is pressured by others, including some Vietnamese, to tell her story, partially motivated by the fact that Inseon has come so far, from Korea itself, to hear her story. Kang brilliantly teases out the power dynamics and the complexity of bearing witness and documenting memories, as this old woman is pressured to relive what happened to her by someone from the country that committed the atrocity in the first place.

There are many brilliant moments like that in We Do Not Part. What I appreciate in it the most in the seamless merging of form and content. It does not just explore the themes and send a 'message' (although the factual message cannot be clearer). It is, first and foremost, a work of literary art, written in gorgeous prose conveying entrapping atmosphere. It is an achingly beautiful book for many reads and re-reads.

Thank you. NetGalley, and the publisher, for the review copy.

A lot of this deffo went over my head.

I felt that the two stories/sections didn’t marry together very well and I would have liked there to be a clearer thread between the two.

There were some really interesting themes here around the snow, light, shadows etc. and it was beautifully written.

I think covering historical events like this through fiction isn’t easy to do, but it was done well here.

That being said, a lot of that second half dragged because it started to feel a bit info dumpy.

I have difficulty to review this book. The first part was easy to follow but it became more abstract and a little too confusing for my liking. One strong image will stay with me from this book though (the snow flakes falling on someone face). I think this book is still a beautiful way to discuss violent past and although it's an history I don't know a lot about, I still have the feeling I learned a little about what happened there and then. Thank you Penguin General UK for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.