We Do Not Part by Han Kang

We Do Not Part by Han Kang

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR FOYLES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025
AN OBSERVER BEST BOOK OF THE CENTURY SO FAR

Like a long winter’s 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 Kyungha as she travels from the city of Seoul into the forests of Jeju Island, to the home of her old friend Inseon. Hospitalized 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 Inseon’s house, unaware as yet of the descent into darkness which awaits her.

There, the long-buried story of Inseon’s 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

‘A vital voice and a writer of extraordinary humanity. Her work is a gift to us all’ Max Porter

‘A remarkable novelist who reflects our modern condition with courage, imagination, and keen intelligence’ Min Jin Lee

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WARWICK PRIZE FOR WOMEN IN TRANSLATION

[Han Kang’s] empathy for vulnerable, often female, lives is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose. . She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose -- Nobel Prize in Literature Committee
One of the greatest living writers . . . She is a voice for women, for truth and, above all, for the power of what literature can be -- Eimear McBride
Unforgettable . . . A disquietingly beautiful novel about the impossibility of waking up from the nightmare of history. Hang Kang’s prose, as delicate as footprints in the snow or a palimpsest of shadows, conjures up the specters haunting a nation, a family, a friendship -- Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Trust
A visionary novel about history, trauma, art and its tremendous costs. Han Kang is one of the most powerfully gifted writers in the world. With each work, she transforms her readers, and rewrites the possibilities of the novel as a form -- Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies
Bold and revelatory, disquieting and subversive, Han’s style is both spare and lyrical * Guardian *
A courageous and gifted writer whose work has truly global resonance . . . [Han Kang’s] writing is nuanced, supple and precise * Irish Times *
Han Kang. Behind these two syllables lies a novelist in the image of her latest translated work, We Do Not Part: fine, precise prose, with a poetry that willingly plunges into the fantastic, but sufficiently complex to conceal, beneath its praise of dreams and the imaginary, an implacable depiction of human cruelty * Le Monde *

Han Kang (Author)
Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. In 1993 she made her literary debut as a poet and published her first short story in 1994. She won the Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian and was shortlisted for The White Book. In 2024, Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life’.

Among other major awards and prizes she is the winner of the Prix Medicis Etranger 2023 for the French edition of We Do Not Part. She taught in the department of creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts for eleven years before leaving in 2018 to focus on writing. She is the fifth writer to contribute to the ongoing Future Library project in Oslo, Norway.

e. yaewon (Translator)
e. yaewon translates from and into Korean. Most recently, she translated Hwang Jungeun's dd's Umbrella and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts and co-translated Han Kang's Greek Lessons and Samuel Beckett's Selected Shorter Plays.

Paige Morris (Translator)
Paige Morris is a writer and translator from Jersey City, New Jersey, who divides her time between South Korea and the United States. She has translated fiction by Hyun-Joo Park, Ji-min Lee, Soyeon Jeong, and many more.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780241600269
ISBN 10	024160026X
Title	We Do Not Part
Author	Han Kang
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Penguin Books Ltd
Year published	2025-02-06
Number of pages	384
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.