Like a long winters dream, this haunting and visionary new novel from 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang takes us on a journey from contemporary South Korea into its painful history
One of the most profound and skilled writers working on the contemporary world stage Deborah Levy
Beginning one morning in December, WE DO NOT PART traces the path of a young woman, Kyungha, as she travels from the city of Seoul into the forests of Jeju Island, to the home of her old friend Inseon. Hospitalised following an accident, Inseon has begged Kyungha to hasten there to feed her beloved pet bird, who will otherwise die.
Kyungha takes the first plane to Jeju, but a snowstorm hits the island the moment she arrives, plunging her into a world of white. Beset by icy wind and snow squalls, she wonders if she will arrive in time to save the bird or even survive the terrible cold which envelops her with every step. As night falls, she struggles her way to Inseons house, unaware as yet of the descent into darkness which awaits her.
There, the long-buried story of Inseons family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in a painstakingly assembled archive documenting a terrible massacre on the island seventy years before.
We Do Not Part is a hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination and above all an indictment against forgetting.
Translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris
