Another masterclass in storytelling from Han Kang. WE DO NOT PART sheds light on a dark, often-forgotten chapter of Korea’s past while toeing the line between dream and reality. Hauntingly beautiful and quietly captivating.

We Do Not Part by Han Kang is an interesting dream-like read. I especially appreciated the imagery of the snow and the island of Jeju. Han Kang is talented at writing about horror. Thanks to Random House and NetGalley for the eARC.

We Do Not Part was an incredible novel. I suggest reading Human Acts first.. I loved the ethereal writing and the uncertainty of what was real and wasn't. great nature writing.

Han Kang has written another novel using magical realism and the forces of nature to describe real horrors, generational trauma and making peace with the past. This is not a novel that will be for everyone. Much of this book exists in a dream-like state as the main character suffers from maladies both physical and emotional and in this case the horrors of the past are visited upon the bodies of the present. Kyungha is a writer of unknown age, who is all alone trying to write in a sweltering apartment in the heat of summer. We know that she had a family at one time and that her health problems may have driven them away, but we are not told anything else. One day she receives a message from a friend named Inseon asking her to please come. The two women had previously decided to work together to create a documentary project about the massacre at Jeju island, in which thousands of men, women and children were murdered in 1948-1950. Kyungha decides not to do the project, but finds out Inseon has been working on it on her own.

Upon arriving at a hospital in Seoul, Kyungha finds that her friend has had a woodworking accident and must stay in the hospital. Inseon asks Kyungha to go to her home in Jeju and take care of her pet bird who was only left with food and water enough for a few days. The main portion of the story begins as Kyungha finds herself traveling by bus and then walking miles in a snowstorm to Inseon's home. Kang's descriptions of the heavy snow, the wind and the black trees that resemble people give a creepy edge to this story. Upon arriving after nearly freezing to death, Kyungha finds the research her friend has done of the massacre and through conversations with Inseon or her possible spirit, learns about the connections between Inseon's mother and the victims of the atrocities. The book is difficult and it clear that the author feels the island of Jeju is haunted in a way by the bodies buried there and the fact that the government took a long time to recognize and identify the remains for the families. Kang's book "The Vegetarian" is one of my favorite books, and this book belongs in the same realm as it deals with the trauma that can transcend generations. The author also uses birds, snow and other depictions to relate to the emotional elements that affect her characters. I will be thinking about this book for some time. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy of this ARC for review.

This is my first time reading Han Kang, and while I can appreciate her poetic prose and the emotional depth she brings to the story, I think I probably should’ve started with one of her other books. We Do Not Part is a beautifully written exploration of friendship and history, but I struggled to connect with the plot. The way Kang blends reality with dreamlike sequences adds a unique touch, though I found the pacing slow and the historical elements a bit hard to follow. Still, it’s clear why she’s so highly regarded, and I’ll likely try another of her books in the future.

We Do Not Part is an incredible novel. I learned so much and resonated so deeply with Kang's writing and the characters. All of her books are exquisite.

I got about 7 chapters into this one before I had to DNF. At first it was fine but it was just slowing down and I was not understanding the plot. I will come back to it eventually but not now!

I finished We Do Not Part back in February, and now that it’s March, I think I’m finally ready to share my thoughts.

Ever since I read The Vegetarian, I knew I wanted to explore more of Han Kang’s work, and I’m so glad I finally did.

We Do Not Part is haunting, devastating, and surreal. It will have you questioning what’s real and what’s imagined, but most importantly, it introduces readers to one of the darkest chapters of South Korean history. During the Jeju Island Massacre, 30,000 people were killed children, mothers, daughters, sons, fathers, brothers, neighbors… the list goes on.

Kyungha lives a solitary life, plagued by nightmares, unable to keep food down, and reliant on medication. One day, she receives a call from an old friend, Inseon, who is stuck in a hospital in Seoul. Inseon begs her to travel to Jeju Island to save her bird, Ama. Within a day, Kyungha sets off amid a daunting storm, but when she arrives, nothing is as she remembers.

The imagery in this novel is stunning. I found myself mesmerized by Han Kang’s writings incluing recurring motifs about nature, snow, blood, bodies that weave a haunting atmosphere. This is a book best read slowly, allowing yourself to fully absorb its hidden histories, family ties, and long-buried secrets. I cannot recommend it enough.

Trigger warnings: Blood, mutilation, death, massacre.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for an advanced reader’s copy of We Do Not Part.

I did not know what to think, or expect, going into this, as I have loved one of the kings books, and disliked the other but when I found here was a perfect mixture of her other book. The surrealism that didn’t work for me in her other book was perfect in this one, and the historical elements had accuracy and depth without giving any in quality writing.

This book is not an easy read, as we are diving into the events of a massacre, so knowing that going in should help to keep people from being surprised by all the various heartbreaking triggers. Kang was excellent, she messages to inform, while also writing some thing that reads like poetry. Her books often gave me the sense that I was not intelligent enough for them, and at times I wondered if that was the intended effect, but in this case, I think she struck a cord that was perfectly in between. intellect and emotion

I’ll switch not easy times there are many heartbreaks in our names but I don’t think he done characters in rank show me smile in spite of the horrors that surrounded them, I love one of them can teach me something now and I pick up historical fiction hoping for that each time and often the setting is more of a factor backdrop then a fully realized, setting or environment, but that was not the case here at all, and this was nearly if I start Reid, but not quite sure, others will feel that it is worthy of the five stars, but for me personally, it was missing certain investment. I found a rating to be beautiful, but there was some distance between myself and the characters. and I could not seem to bridge.

Kyungha is living in Seoul and considering suicide, but can't figure out who will bear responsibility for arranging her affairs. Her depression stems from her work documenting the Gwangyu student protests and the violent reprisals that followed. She's cut ties with everyone, even lost touch with her best friend, a woman who worked as a photographer when she was a journalist and who eventually left her job to move back to the island of Jeju to care for her elderly mother. Then she receives a call to come see her old friend, Inseon, now in a hospital in Seoul.

Her friend, who became a woodworker after her mother's death, has been injured in an accident and needs Kyungha to rush to her faraway home to take care of her bird, who has been without food or water and who will die unless Kyungha can get there quickly. She sets out for the island, her plane landing in a snowstorm, the buses that she needs to get there are barely running and even when she does finally reach her stop, she'll have a long walk in the snow and dark to reach her friend's isolated house.

This story follows Kyungha as she travels to Inseon's house and the path of this novel seems straightforward, but what is really happening is a look at trauma, how it affects the survivors and also the people who research the horrors of the Korean War and of the repressive dictatorship that followed. Just as Kyungha can't escape the knowledge of and the images in her mind of the mass graves, neither can Inseon escape what happened on the island of Jeju, where tens of thousands were massacred in an elimination campaign that included infants and children, an event that scarred the island and her parents.

This is a gorgeously written book, where every sense is evoked, which makes the emotional impact of what is being illuminated harder to read. Lingering over the beauty of the language, when what the language is describing atrocity makes for reading that punches hard, but elegantly. There's a sense of unreality, as the reader and Kyungha struggle to differentiate between memory, hallucination and reality and as what is actually happening to Kyungha becomes more difficult to figure out, the impact of the history that haunts them becomes stronger. I'll be thinking about this book for a long time and it makes a good companion to her earlier book Human Acts.

I found this book to be hard to categorize. It's surreal, tragic, horrifying, haunting, and sometimes just plain weird. The prose is beautiful, and conjures powerful images.

The story opens with Kyungha and her solitary life. She receives a call from Inseon, a friend and sculptor, who is in a hospital after a terrible accident. Inseon asks Kyungha to travel to Inseon's home on the island of Jeju, and feed and water her budgie. Kyungha travels by bus through a snowstorm, and this is when the story begins to feel more and more like a dream. Author Han Kang repeatedly moves from Kyungha's present, and her arrival at Inseon's home, to the past, when soldiers were brutalising and killing innocents.

The heavy snow casts an otherworldly air to the story, and it becomes increasingly hard to tell what is real and what isn't, even while we're shown how the terrible moments in the past have a very personal connection to the present.

It's easy to believe that something like the horrors Kang describes could not happen again, but they do, repeatedly, and it's important to remember.

The story is heartbreaking and immersive. I needed to take breaks while reading, but kept getting drawn back. I was impressed by Kang's skill and ability to evoke such moving scenes.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Random House Publishing Group - Random House for this ARC in exchange for my review.

There was a lot to like about this one. The descriptions of snow were gorgeous. I learned about lesser known parts of Korean history, but my brain started to conflate the different events and characters. I wish the book had focused on just one moment in history. Ultimately, the book lost me in the second half.

Early on in the book, the narrator's best friend, Inseon, has had an accident, and is in a hospital where she is getting a particularly excruciating and repetitive pain treatment, by inducing pain every five minutes (!), to ensure the pain nerves develop properly as part of the healing. The narrator finds the description of the exercise bewildering, and soon goes on to connect the cause of the injury back to herself.

That is symptomatic of the pain and anguish that forms the core of the novel. There are roundabout connections uncovered along a painful path of discovery, and the recollections come in waves, with narratives nested inside narratives, and memories nested those narratives, and photographs and newspaper clippings rounding out the whole package. There is considerable storytelling happening here, and most readers will find it beggaring their belief as they find out about the atrocities described herein, based on real events of ethnic cleansing along the parts of the Korean peninsula, a few years either side of 1950. Thousands were massacred, entire villages and regions wiped off the face of the Earth, mercilessly and remorselessly. Official apologies came as late as 2003 and 2018, but not from all parties involved. Without going into too much details, the story presented here is one particular perspective, but as collected from survivors or near survivors, witnesses and next of kin.

The first half of the book is a bewildering journey by the narrator to a remote village where Inseon lives - ostensibly to save her pet bird. Reading it one may find it difficult to imagine what's coming later on. She gets lost, almost dies, falls down a small ravine, gets buried in snow, very nearly freezes to death before making it to the cottage. Her personal plight serves the purpose of preparing the reader to what's coming. It may feel overwhelming - seeing what all she goes through, to save a pet bird, that may or may not be still alive by the time she reaches the remote cottage. Along the way, she reminisces of Inseon, how they met, some good times, and some of what may have led to the accident that triggered the chain of events that led our narrator on her way in such life-threatening conditions.

Once she reaches the cottage, however, the story takes a new approach. Part fever-dream, part seemingly hallucinatory, part phantasmagoric - the story peels back layer after layer of memorabilia and memories as being told by Inseon, who has surprisingly appeared at the cottage shortly after the narrator herself reaches it. From that point on, the story is a veritable roller-coaster, with each page revealing new horrors and hitherto unbelievable anguish and loss. Yet, somehow, Inseon carries on telling her story, which actually turns out to be her Mother's story.

By no means an easy read, this book brings forth an important and relatively unexplored aspect of the history of the Korean peninsula, the true extent of which is largely unknown outside the immediate geography. Decades have passed, and yet many of the families impacted by the pogroms have had no closure. Many never will. At least some of the complicit parties have never apologized. Ultimately, the book is a sad reminder of how widespread humanity's sense of hatred is - for itself, and how pervasive our sense of "us vs. them" is.

In times of a more-divided-than-ever-before society and world, we need to see a mirror like this to remind us that there's more ways in which we are alike than ways (in which) we are different. Can a way of thinking justify literally exterminating communities? Isn't that what's still happening in 2025? Will we ever stop? Are we even capable of stopping?

Many thanks to Han Kang, Random House / Hogarth and NetGalley for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an advance copy in exchange for honest feedback.

I don’t know if this was a bad time to read this, or if this was exactly the book I needed. But I don’t regret reading this.

I’m going say upfront: you will want to check the content warnings. I do not say that lightly. Han Kang is unflinching in her focus on the most difficult aspects of history because it’s a story that needs to be told, and it’s a story we need to listen to.

When I started reading his, the book descends so much into dreams and dream like qualities that it was difficult to follow. But that is intentional. The MC is often seen as an unreliable narrator because tyrannical governments don’t make it easy to seem reliable. It also reflects the hazy nature of memory, particularly memories that people have tried to suppress.

This book is haunting, sad, hazy, and painful. But it’s important. Sometimes we need to be reminded that just testifying to uncomfortable truths is a revolutionary act. And if it’s not your story to tell, it’s revolutionary to shut up and listen.

WE DO NOT PART opens with a snowscape where black tree stumps recall the bodies of people massacred on Jeju Island decades ago. Kyungha is a writer who wrote a book about the massacre. Now haunted by it, she has been asked by her injured friend Inseon to journey to Jeju Island to save a beloved pet bird. As Kyungha struggles through a serious blizzard to reach Inseon’s house, moments from their friendship and interactions with the bird are interwoven with the falling snow of a blizzard and the historic massacre. Though there is a journey and movement, the novel is a slow one, built over memory and scene and image rather than story and plot. At the same time, it is a haunting, evocative, and beautifully written book, and I understand why Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Nobel Prize winner Han Kang is a South Korean writer who rose to prominence for her novel The Vegetarian, an enigmatic book that (to me) seemed to be about the inferior position of women in South Korean culture; dysfunctional families; artistic obsession; and mental illness.

Han Kang's 2021 novel, 'We Do Not Part', now translated into English, is another cryptic novel that focuses on the consequences of bloody massacres that occurred in South Korea after World War II.

I'm not sure what would (or would be not) be spoilers for this unusual book. So just to be safe, I'll say there might be spoilers ahead.

When we meet the narrator of 'We Do Not Part', a Seoul writer called Kyungha, she's long parted from most of her family and friends, and is emerging from years of isolation. Kyungha is plagued by migraines, stomach spasms and night terrors, which may be connected (in part) with Kyungha's research for her book about the massacre at G-. [Note: We can take this to be the Gwangju Uprising, a series of student-led demonstrations that occurred in Gwangju, South Korea in May 1980.]

Kyungha describes a recurring dream - which she's had for years - as follows: Snow is falling and thousands of black tree trunks jut from a low hill. They vary in height, like a crowd of people ranging in age. Stooped and listing, they give the impression of a thousand men, women and haggard children huddling in the snow. The sea is encroaching on these 'gravestones', and they need to be moved to safety.

Kyungha depicts some of her other disturbing dreams as follows:

"I can't recall the face of the uniformed man who kicked me in the flank as I lay sprawled on the ground and turned me over with his boots. What I do remember is the shudder that ran through me when he grabbed his gun with both hands and pushed the bayonet into my chest."

"Alongside women unknown to me, I climbed down the well, helping them to hold on to their children. We thought it would be safe down there, but without warning a shower of bullets rained down on us from above."

"When we stepped inside, the mass murderer was standing with his back to a wall.....Murderer, I thought I should say. I opened my mouth. Murderer.....What are you going to do about all the people you've killed, I said, using every last once of energy I had."

Kyungha's recurring dream about the black tree trunks inspires her to do a joint project with her friend Inseon - a photographer, documentarian, and carpenter. Kyungha asks Inseon, 'What if we do something together? What if you and I were to plant logs in a field, dress them in black ink, and film them under falling snow?' Inseon agrees, and suggests they use a tract of land she inherited on the island of Jeju - Inseon's childhood home, to which she returned to care for her (now deceased) mother.

[Note: Jeju was the site of a slaughter that occurred between April 1948 and May 1949. The trouble began when communists and left-wing demonstrators, protesting government repression and the division of Korea, started burning police stations and government buildings. The South Korean government, in collaboration with the United States occupying forces, viciously quelled the uprising, and at least 30,000 people - men, women, and children - were massacred.]

Once the tree trunk project in underway, Kyungha cools to the idea. Inseon carries on, though, preparing log after log in her carpentry shop in Jeju. This leads to a shocking accident, and two of Inseon's right fingertips are severed. Inseon is quickly transported from Jeju to Seoul, to reattach the tips, and is now having painful injections every three minutes, 24 hours a day, to save her fingers.

Kyungha learns of Inseon's injury when she gets a text from her friend, asking her to come to the Seoul hospital right away. Kyungha rushes over, and Inseon implores the writer to go to Jeju IMMEDIATELY, to take care of Inseon's budgie, Ama, who'll otherwise die. Kyungha embarks on a nightmare trip to Inseon's remote house in Jeju - by plane, bus, and on foot - in the midst of a blizzard.

At one point, Kyungha falls into a dried-up stream bed, becomes encased in snow, and curls up in her coat to preserve her body heat. She observes, "My jaw throbs as if it might fall out from the incessant chattering, and I bear the pain by biting down on my stiff snow-covered sleeve to still my teeth." Kyungha struggles on and eventually reaches Inseon's house and carpentry shop, where reality combines with illusion.

At Inseon's home, Kyungha sees to Ama, clears snowdrifts, changes into dry clothes, and then.... weirdly......Inseon appears. "Her face was pale and gaunt, though not to the extent it had been in the hospital. She was rubbing her eyes with her right hand, which looked immaculate, entirely unscathed." Inseon gets a fire going, shows Kyungha the logs she prepared for the project, makes tea, and prepares juk. Kyungha isn't sure what's real and what isn't or who's alive and who's dead. It doesn't matter, because Inseon is there to share her mother's experiences during the South Korean uprisings.

Inseon admits, "I didn't really know my mum so well as it turns out....And all the while I thought I knew her." Inseon's mum, Jeongsim, never talked about the Jeju slaughter. But after Jeongsim died, Inseon found her mum's boxes, filled with newspaper clippings, photos, letters, and notes about the massacres of the 1950s. Jeongsim's brother (Inseon's uncle) disappeared during the chaos, and Jeongsim went to great lengths to find him, or at least to find a bit of his bone to bury. The book contains long segments about Jeongsim's memories of the time, and the tale is dreadful and sad.

While listening to Inseon's story, Kyungha recalls her own library research, done a few years ago. Kyungha notes, "All afternoon, I read about how from mid-November of 1948, the uplands of Jeju burned for three months....By the spring of 1949, when the scorched-earth policy was temporarily abandoned after the state failed to find the whereabouts of the roughly hundred guerrillas, an estimated twenty thousand civilians were hiding out in Hallasan [Halla Mountain]....They had judged it safer to brave starvation and the cold than risk facing the summary executions along the shores..The commander who had been appointed to the island in March announced plans to sweep through Hallasan to eradicate all commie guerillas, and leaflet bombed the island to flush civilians out to the coast for the efficiency of their operations. Archive photos showed rows of emaciated men and women walking down slopes, shielding children and elders with their bodies even as they held up branches tied with white cloth, an entreaty to the soldiers not to shoot." Of course the military reneged on its promise of safe passage, and rounded up people by the thousands. Many of these ended up in mass graves. The novel contains vivid descriptions of these harrowing incidents. The following passages illustrate some of the brutality perpetrated by the South Korean Military working with the United States occupying forces.

This passage depicts events at a cobalt mine in Gyeongsan: "Over many days, military trucks drove in and out of the mine. There are accounts from residents of how the sound of gunfire continued from early dawn to the middle of the night. When the drifts and shafts were full of corpses, they simply moved into the hills and went on killing and burying in a nearby valley."

These scenes were observed by a witness: "I hid under a blanket and listened to the gunfire. All the while my heart wouldn't stop trembling for the children I'd seen out on the sands. There were women holding babies as young as my son, and one woman looked like she'd give birth any day....It was growing dark when the guns stopped....I peeked out of the door again. The soldiers were hurling bodies into the ocean, and people lay bloodied, their faces in the sand."

Kyungha and Inseon's conversation reveals that Inseon has been suffering just as much as Kyungha, but in a different way. Inseon grew exhausted caring for her dying mum, who was ill with dementia. Then when Jeongsim passed, and Inseon found her mum's files, the documentarian felt compelled to visit massacre sites and fill in the gaps in Jeongsim's notes. This left terrible images in her mind.

In the end - though Kyungha may be in the midst of a fantasy - she feels she can proceed with the tree trunk project.

The book is filled with imagery of snow falling, and in an NPR interview, Han Kang explains why: “Snow; It falls between the sky and the earth and connecting them both. And it falls between the living and the dead, between light and darkness, between silence and memories. And I thought of the connection, the circular flow of water and air. We are all connected over this earth so I had this image of the snow. I wanted the snow to fall from beginning to end and I wanted even my characters to enter into that dream of snow.”

I find Han Kang's unconventional writing style somewhat difficult, but this is a memorable book. Highly recommended.

Note: For decades, the Jeju massacre was a forbidden topic in South Korea. The military dictatorships that controlled the country in the second half of the twentieth century tried to cover up the event. Now, the South Korean government has taken steps to address the historical injustices of the Jeju Uprising, including apologies, memorials, and educational programs to ensure future generations understand its significance.

Thanks to Netgalley, Han Kang, and Random House for a copy of the book.

We Do Not Part by Han Kang is a beautifully written, atmospheric story about two women that involves the backstory of Korean history. Kyungha is asked by her friend to care for her bird while her friend is in the hospital. And Kyungha goes through a lot to get to her friend's house in the snow to care for her bird. This story was written like a dream, where the reader was unsure of what was true for most of the story. But it was so beautifully and atmospherically written, that it drew me in. I really enjoyed Kang's writing here and would definitely recommend this unique and thought-provoking story. Thanks to NetGalley for the free digital review copy. All opinions are my own.

Han Kang's We Do Not Part is a gorgeous, dark story about trauma that is told in sparing, haunting prose. This is absolutely the perfect read on a dark winter night, and will leave you contemplating your place in history and how humanity endures and survives.

At it's simplest level, We Do Not Part starts with the story of Kyungha, an author, who is kept awake at night thinking about the Gwangju that she's writing about. Her friend, Inseon, reaches out with a favor. Can Kyungha help Inseon save her pet bird, while she is stuck receiving medical care? The journey will force Kyungha to consider her trauma and work through the past. Gorgeous and haunting, I will be thinking about this story for weeks.

I just read a review by someone named Roman Clodia, and honestly, you should go read that one, because it is perfect. If, after reading that, you are still not convinced you should read this book, I will tell you this. I was confused at the beginning—confused enough to ask my daughter and husband what they thought of the plot as I understood it so far—I honestly thought I had missed something. And I had missed something. Thankfully, I kept reading. I did not know about the history King references, so a few internet searches helped. And wow. This book is a stunner. So many layers of friendships, family, and tragic history. So many things meaning so much more than they first appear. I am not, generally, a re-reader, but this is certainly a book I would re-read. If for nothing else but to begin with more patience, knowing that everything is not as straightforward as it first appears, and that in the end, in Kang's deft hands, I will be moved to weeping. A masterpiece.