We Do Not Part

Kyungha is a writer living alone near Seoul who cannot sleep and dreams, night after night, of black tree trunks standing in snow by the sea. A message comes from her friend Inseon, a documentary maker and woodworker who moved back to her mother's village on Jeju Island: she has cut off two fingers in her workshop and is in a Seoul hospital, and she needs Kyungha to go to Jeju at once to feed her pet bird, Ama, before it dies. Kyungha goes. A blizzard closes over the island, she loses the path to the village, falls into a dry stream bed and blacks out, and when she reaches the house the bird is already dead. She buries it. The power fails, and in the dark, unheated house Inseon appears, though she cannot be there, and begins to talk.

What Inseon tells is the story of her mother, who as a girl survived the massacres on Jeju in 1948 and 1949, when soldiers and police killed tens of thousands of islanders as suspected communists, and who spent her life searching for a brother taken away and killed. Han Kang builds the second half of the novel out of that testimony, the archives and photographs Inseon's mother collected, and the snow that falls on the present and the past alike. The ending will not settle: the two women sit out in the snow by the last of a candle, Kyungha no longer sure which of them is the apparition or whether she herself is dead, and the book closes on a struck match.

This is a short, slow, wintry book, translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, and Han has called it a pair with Human Acts, her novel of the Gwangju uprising. Kirkus praised "the quiet intricacy of the author's prose"; Publishers Weekly called the prose "dreamy yet devastating"; Leigh Haber in the Los Angeles Times found it "exquisite and profoundly disquieting" and offering no answers. It suits readers of Sebald and of Human Acts, and anyone willing to read a novel about an atrocity that approaches it through snow, a bird and a friendship.