We Do Not Part

August 1, 2024

Han won the International Booker Prize for The Vegetarian and the Prix Medicis �tranger for this newest when it was published in France last year. It is a story of friendship, Korean history, the Jeju massacre, and traumatic memory. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 1, 2024
Nobel laureate Kang's latest protagonist--also an author, perhaps Kang's stand-in--recalls her 2014 title "about the massacre in G--," which is exactly when Kang's Human Acts, about the 1980s Gwangju Uprising, debuted in Korea. Plagued now by nightmares, Kyungha, as her name is revealed, berates herself. "Having decided to write about mass killings and torture, how could I have so naively--brazenly--hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it?" The nightmares' intensifying vividity inspires her to contact a close friend, photographer and documentary filmmaker Inseon, about the possibility of the two women collaborating on a film adaptation of these indelible images. Four years pass, until Inseon summons her to a Seoul hospital after a horrific accident, imploring Kyungha to go to Jeju Island to care for her precious budgie. Despite severely dangerous winter conditions, Kyungha finally arrives. Then what seems impossible happens. Inseon's spirit joins Kyungha to reveal horrific historical truths about the Jeju Massacre (1948-49), which Inseon's mother miraculously survived while "upward of thirty thousand civilians were slaughtered" by the U.S.-backed Korean military. Once more, Kang brilliantly examines the breadth of human relationships--from unconditional mother-child bonds to timeless friendship to heinous inhumanity. e.yaewon, who cotranslated Kang's Greek Lessons (2023) as Emily Yae Won, returns here with Morris to gift English-reading audiences with tragic terror, luminous insight, and ethereal glimmers of hope.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With Kang receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature this fall, interest in her work will skyrocket, with special interest in this forthcoming novel.

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Starred review from September 9, 2024
Kang (The Vegetarian) delivers an indelible exploration of Korea’s historical traumas through the story of a writer who discovers how her friend’s family was impacted by the 1948–1949 Jeju Massacre, in which U.S.-backed Korean forces killed over 30,000 Jeju Island residents suspected of aiding insurgents. Kyungha spends her days alone in her apartment outside Seoul, where she suffers from migraines and nausea and is plagued by nightmares of a snowy hill where upright tree trunks resembling bodies are submerged by an advancing tide. One morning, she’s unexpectedly contacted by her friend Inseon, who has been hospitalized in Seoul and begs Kyungha to fly to her home on Jeju to care for her bird, Ama, who will not survive long without food. Kyungha travels to Jeju during a fierce snowstorm, and upon her arrival is met by Inseon’s apparition, who tells her about the torture of Inseon’s father after his home was burned by the Korean military, and how Inseon’s mother came home from a cousin’s house to find her entire village executed—except for her brother, whose uncertain fate haunted her for years. In dreamy yet devastating prose, Kang details Inseon’s evolving relationship with her late mother, whom Inseon cared for during her final years as she struggled with dementia and memories of the massacre. The result is a meticulously rendered portrait of friendship, mother-daughter love, and hope in the face of profound loss. Kang is at the top of her game.

Starred review from December 1, 2024
The lyrical latest novel from the new Nobel laureate. "When someone who hasn't slept soundly in a while, who is stumbling through a period of nightmares blurring with reality, chances across a scene that defies belief, they may well initially doubt themselves," we are told early on by Kyungha, the narrator. Even at the beginning, Kyungha doesn't seem to have a firm grip on what is and what isn't real. She's moved by herself into an apartment near Seoul, where she hasn't unpacked, barely sleeps, eats less, and spends her time writing and rewriting a will that she tears up and writes again every day. Still, when Inseon, an old friend and colleague, texts to say she's in the hospital and then asks Kyungha to hurry from Seoul to Jeju Island, where Inseon's pet bird is caged without food and water, Kyungha complies--in the midst of a snowstorm. Even through the veil of translation, the quiet intricacy of the author's prose glitters throughout, but nowhere is this so evident as in her descriptions of the snow: "As the snow lands on the wet asphalt, each flake seems to falter for a moment. Then, like a trailing sentence at the close of a conversation, like the dying fall of a final cadence, like fingertips cautiously retreating before ever landing on a shoulder, the flakes sink into the slick blackness and are soon gone." This is a mysterious book that resists easy interpretation, but it's clearly addressing the violent legacies of the past. As Kyungha trudges through the snow toward Inseon's house, trying to reach the bird before it runs out of water, the reader also knows that, decades earlier, the neighboring village had been incinerated in its entirety. How to hold all this together? A mysterious novel about history and friendship offers no easy answers.

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December 13, 2024

In her new novel, Nobel Prize winner Han (Greek Lessons) weaves historical events with the present. Character Kyungha, who recently published a book on a Korean massacre, suffers from nightmares and an inability to eat. She is close to Inseon, a former documentary filmmaker who now makes her living as a carpenter. When Inseon has a serious accident, she sends Kyungha to her home on the island of Jeju to take care of her bird. In spite of a massive snowstorm, Kyungha reaches the island. During her visit, Kyungha learns from Inseon and her mother, who appear as apparitions, about a massacre on Jeju from 1948 to 1949 that claimed the lives of more than 30,000 civilians, including children. Inseon's mother lost her brother and cousin. Inseon's father was tortured but survived. The government, backed by the United States, attempts to eradicate those they considered communists. Meanwhile, the Korean government keeps silent about the massacre, but over time, the truth surfaces. VERDICT Poetic language expertly describes the mysterious geography of Jeju as Han movingly illustrates how the massacre affected survivors as well as subsequent generations. The memory of a devastating episode that must not be forgotten is revived.--Jacqueline Snider

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