Kang decidedly explores themes of the permanence of people and their tragedies in our lives. Focusing on the Jeju Massacre, we follow a friend of a documentarian, who suddenly shifts to focus on "ghosts" from her past. The narrator follows the friend to a hospital and then eventually to Jeju, where the narrator begins to see the psychological and cultural remnants of the massacre.

Fans of Human Acts will enjoy the social and cultural commentary about the impacts of mass-scale tragedy. The pacing is fast. and I was glued to the novel.

Once in a while I will come upon a book that ticks every single box of things that I have a very strong personal connection to and this book will have a hold on my heart and mind for years to come. This one is one of them.

One of the criticisms I've noticed repeated for We Do Not Part is that nothing happens and the plot is too vague. And while that's not entirely incorrect, I also do not consider this a criticism. This is a novel that's meant to be savored page by page, like a meditation on the present and the past. The events take place over the course of a couple of days and they're painstakingly recounted in minute detail over the course of the novel with intermissions of Inseon's documentary interviews. The macro-focus on the snow and the cold and the suffering of traveling through a snow storm; the intermittence of hallucinatory ghosts and recurring nightmares--all of it overlays over the echoes of generational trauma in a way that seeps into your bones.

At its core, this is a horror novel. About the atrocities of genocide and war, about being haunted by the past, about being stranded all alone with no one to witness your death but lonely ghosts. But at the same time, Han Kang was able to inlay the paragraphs with a certain warmth and tactility. Every description of Kyungha's best friend Inseon is infused with such vivid familiarity, their interactions full of quiet understanding that comes only from knowing someone well for a long time. The way Inseon dresses, the way she holds herself, the way she speaks, the way her house carries traces of her when she's not there--all of it is written with such aching care. So in a way this is also a love letter to a dear friend who carries the same hauntings and who can understand your pain and the holes in your heart better than you can.

Ultimately, this is a eulogy to thousands upon thousands of people who were silently mass executed in the war during the years of 1948-1950. Despite the horrors, Han Kang takes time to be so gentle. Every description of the falling snow, the way it feels to touch the feathers of a breathing bird, the slow fall of wax down a candle. There is a line, that I think encapsulates what this novel is in a nutshell:

<blockquote>As a child, I read that ultra-fine particles of dust or ash had to be present for a snowflake to form. And that clouds were not only made of suspended water droplets but were full of dust and ash that rose from the ground with water vapor.</blockquote>

The ashes and dust of everyone that has parted are still with us, falling from the sky as snow, so we do not say farewell.

Thank you for netgalley and the publisher for the ARC copy.

Wanted to love but couldn’t find my footing in this text. I had high expectations going in and perhaps it was too over my head.

This book is beautifully translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. Kyungha, a writer, struggles with debilitating migraines and often finds herself so nauseous she can’t eat. One day she gets a call from Inseon, a photographer and woodcarver she collaborated with on a documentary about the Jeju Uprising. Inseon has suffered a terrible accident in her woodshop and, because she is as solitary as Kyungha, she needs someone to immediately go to her home on Hallasan to rescue her bird. If Kyunhga doesn’t leave now, the bird will die. The journey to the hinterlands of Jeju is not easy. Her struggle to get to Inseon’s house begins to take on the air of the supernatural. Kyungha has to walk most of the way, through the deep snow and growing dark in her inadequate clothing. At this point, cold, hungry, tired, in pain from a migraine, Kyungha starts to drift through time. She slowly reveals the long, terrible history of the Jeju Uprising, a history that was illegal to speak of for decades under the repressive South Korean government. What really struck me about the book was the way that Kyungha settled into a peaceful acceptance of the past.

Thank you Netgalley for this eARC!

When Kyungha’s oldest and dearest friend, Inseon, ends up in the hospital following an accident, she asks Kyungha to make the journey to her remote home on Jeju Island to rescue her pet bird, Ama. The trip becomes a reckoning for Kyungh, who has recently completed a writing project and proposed a joint project with Inseon about the Jeju 4.3 incident, a harrowing, violent, but little-known period in Korean history, whose impact is still felt throughout the island Inseon calls home.

I don’t even know where to start with this one. It’s a beautiful piece of literature I will be thinking about and referring to for so long after I’ve finished it. It feels like it’s a part of me now. Why? Because it’s not only an amazing piece of writing, but it touches amazingly and deeply on a part of history that I’ve never heard of before - despite so many people dying and my country being so involved.

Han Kang opens the readers’ eyes with such amazing imagery and symbolism, intermixing it with direct stories of the violence and brutality that plagued the island during that period, it provides such an amazing contrast. And using the characters of Kyungha and Inseon (and Inseon’s family) to tell the story was very effect and personal.

This book won’t be for everyone, as I said, it’s definitely very heavy on the symbolism and unfolds like a dream sequence, so people who like more straightforward stories will probably have a harder time with this one. But if you’re willing to spend some time with a story that’s more flowing slowly, almost like a work of art that needs interpreting and sitting with, then this will be a great book for you.

It also will show you a part of Korean history that needs to talked about.

Thank you to Net Galley and Hogarth for the ARC. I was excited to read this, but I think I am not the right audience for this. I prefer books with a faster pacing, and a plot and characters that are interesting.

Originally published in 2021, We Do Not Part explores the massive psychological imprint and mental ramifications left behind on a single individual by the horrors of the Jeju Uprising, a catalyst to the Korean War. It is a quiet, yet bold warning of the destruction of political censorship, as well as a deeply personal and heartbreaking feminist character study.
Written in Kang’s signature poetic style, it does feel very stream of consciousness, weaving fluidly through both the real and not real, as well as what is immediate and what is memory. Flashbacks are not so much set scenes of horrific destruction and sadness, but rather a constant presence shading the edges of Kyungha’s reality and affecting both how she perceives the world and her loyalty to Inseon. In that regard, the concept of We Do Not Part isn’t just a titular callout recognizing the interhuman bonds formed by trauma and survival, but also an adage expressing one’s personal relationship with their own memory and grief. We do not part, because we cannot separate ourselves from our own past.
Despite being difficult to process at times, I cannot think of a single person who shouldn’t read this book. It is a map providing knowledge to a previously hidden aspect of important cultural history, and it does so by engaging and imploring the reader on a personal level. Essentially it turns a set of dates on a timeline into a visceral and tangible series of events that have had lasting consequences on the populations of several countries including Korea, Japan, and the USA. However, this is not a globe spanning narrative. It is the story of a woman, and what surviving in the wake of war looks like.

· Name of the publication/blog/outlet: posted to Instagram (@abrittlebee), Goodreads, and Storygraph

· Run date for when the review will be posted/published: review was published December 23rd, 2024 on Instagram, and on Storygraph and Goodreads on December 30th, 2024

links to the reviews have been submitted with NetGalley Title Feedback

I don’t even know what to say about this book that would do it any justice. It is a story that pulled me in and brought me to tears in many ways. I am gutted by the history here and the long term effects of it. I highly recommend this story. I read a NetGalley copy. I am a huge fan of Han Kang’s work and will always read the next book.

We Do Not Part (Korean title: I Do Not Bid Farewell) tells the story of the massacres committed in Jeju Island between 1948, first by the Japanese occupiers, and later masked as part of the anti-communist campaign, many of the remains in mass graves that remain uncovered to this day.


Han Kang is a truly gifted writer, with beautiful, although sometimes heady, prose. She tells the story of two friends' search for the truth, a woman's untiring search for a missing brother and husband. It tackles topics of aging and dementia, depression, captivity, torture, ethnic cleansing and genocide. All told in a dark, brooding, mysterious tone, set in an isolated cabin in a remote island village during a snowstorm.

<i>At some point, as the materials piled up and began to take on a clearer form, I could feel myself changing. To the point where it seemed nothing one human being did to another could ever shock me again . . .

It’s no coincidence that some thirty thousand people were killed on this island that winter, and another two hundred thousand were murdered on the mainland the next summer. The governing US military ordered that everyone on the island, all roughly three hundred thousand people, be wiped out if that’s what it took to stop their communization, and members of the Seocheong, the extreme-right Northwest Youth League, who were from the north and locked and loaded with willingness and resentment, entered the island dressed in police and army uniforms after two weeks of training. Then the coastal blockade and media blackout followed, the murderous impulse to point a gun at an infant’s head was not only allowed but rewarded—to the extent that children under the age of ten who were killed in this way numbered one and a half thousand—and shortly after this war broke out, and following the precedent here, if one can call it that when the blood has barely dried, they culled around two hundred thousand people from cities and villages throughout the country, transported them in trucks, incarcerated them, shot them, buried them in mass graves—and then prohibited any and all from claiming and collecting the remains. The war not being over, after all, but merely suspended. As the enemy remains, just over the Armistice Line. As not only shunned and stigmatized families but everyone else kept mum under threat of being branded an enemy sympathizer the moment they opened their mouths. Decades passed in the meantime, decades down in the valleys, the mine, beneath the runway, decades before the mounds of marbles and small skulls shot through with bullet holes were excavated, and still to this day there are bones upon bones that remain buried.

Those children.
Children killed in the name of extermination.</i>

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for providing a digital ARC for review.

Han Kang is an incredible writer, though I found parts of this book to be a bit challenging to track, including some of the historical detail.

An intensely illuminating book on the powers of friendship and the grips that the past can have. Kyungha is tasked by her friend, who recently was in an accident and hospitalized, to go to her village and take care of her precious bird. As Kyungha makes the trek through a treacherous blizzard and snow storm to get to her friends house, she reflects upon her friend's life. Paralleling her journey with that of her friend's parents and family, we are immersed into an intensely frigid world, that leaves catastrophes in it's wake. This was a powerful story and I loved the alternating timelines, and POVs.

There is much to like about this novel, but in the end, I was underwhelmed. The crescendo of symbolism was subtle at first, but then became weighted down, like the deathly snowstorm itself. The novel was strongest in its depiction of the tie between the two main characters who came together to reveal stories of the past and became inseparable friends, even in death. The intertwining them of the genocide was so heavy-handed that it bordered on genocide porn. Worse than that, it was told in a distanced-dreamy way, concentrating on the magnitude instead of the individuals, which is dehumanizing for the victims. Stalin is purported to say that one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic. Unfortunately, in this novel, the reader is buried under the deaths to such an extent as to numb the senses, turning each of those individual tragedies into a mere statistic. Thank you, Netgalley and Random House, for the opportunity to read this book.

Wow the complexity in her storytelling is unmatched. Books by this author always linger with me in a way that is so special.

It takes a special kind of courage and resilience to study the blackest corners of our history. It makes sense to never want to speak of the worst things humans have done to each other. And yet, if we never speak of the Holocaust, chattel slavery, genocide, etc., or only learn a distorted version of these events, how can we truly learn to be better, just people? As I read We Do Not Part, the brilliant and shattering new novel by Han Kang, I kept thinking of the mental toll Iris Chang paid after researching and writing her book about the Rape of Nanking. The protagonists of this book also find themselves haunted by what they learned when they researched the Jeju Uprising and the mass killings that followed in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This book is beautifully translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris.

Kyungha, a writer, struggles with debilitating migraines and often finds herself so nauseous she can’t eat. Sometime before the novel, she left her family and moved into her own apartment. It’s hard to tell how long she’s been in the grip of terrible depression and pain, though she seems to be emerging from it. One wintry morning, she gets a call from Inseon, a photographer and woodcarver she collaborated with on a documentary about the Jeju Uprising and the survivors’ efforts to find, identify, and reclaim the remains of their lost loved ones. Inseon has suffered a terrible accident in her woodshop and, because she is as solitary as Kyungha, she needs someone to immediately go to her home on Hallasan, the dormant volcano on Jeju Island, to rescue her bird. Inseon tells Kyungha that she has to leave right away. The bird hasn’t been cared for in the days it took to get Inseon to the mainland, get through surgery, and start her horrifically painful recovery process. If Kyunhga doesn’t leave now, the bird will die.

The journey to the hinterlands of Jeju is not easy. The entire island is covered in snow. The buses are struggling to complete their routes and the airport is already canceling flights by the time Kyungha arrives. Her struggle to get to Inseon’s house begins to take on the air of the supernatural. People appear on the road like ghosts. (One of them might actually be a ghost.) Kyungha has to walk most of the way, through the deep snow and growing dark in her inadequate clothing. She falls, recovers, and finally makes it to Inseon’s house. Kyungha is so out of it that she starts to wonder if she died on the way and is in some kind of afterlife.

At this point, cold, hungry, tired, in pain from a migraine, Kyungha starts to drift through time. She slowly reveals the long, terrible history of the Jeju Uprising, a history that was illegal to speak of for decades under the repressive South Korean government. Kyungha remembers Inseon’s hunt to find out what happened to relatives and friends of her mother who were killed during the Uprising or its aftermath. Inseon’s intense quest mirrors her mother’s quieter but no less determined efforts to find out what happened to her lost ones, where, and when. None of them can forget, even though carrying the memories is clearly killing something inside of them. If they don’t remember, the people who were killed all those decades ago will be completely forgotten.

I marveled at Han Kang’s writing as we went deeper into Kyungha’s memories and the memories of Jeju Islanders. My summary is much more hamfisted than the subtle, thoughtful revelations in We Do Not Part. What really struck me about the book was the way that Kyungha settled into a peaceful acceptance of the past. She does not forget but she learns to move forward while carrying the memory of what happened on Jeju Island, all those years ago. It is possible to live even after learning the terrible reality of our histories if we are willing to bear the pain long enough to find our way through to the other side, metaphorically. If we can do this, the lost need not stay lost forever. Perhaps, we might even find a measure of justice for the crimes of the past.

This book is gorgeously written — beautiful, sad, and haunting. It is understandable why this author is a Nobel Prize winner. This book has opened my eyes to war crimes that were unknown to me and it saddens me that nothing in this world has changed. It calls for us to remember everyone in this world who has ever suffered a similar fate of mass murder and ethnic cleansing that has happened and continues to happen in the world for various reasons through the focus of Jeju 4:3 points massacres that took place in April 1948. Jeju 4:3 encompasses atrocities that stretched back into preceding months and continued over 1 year later where horrendous war crimes and other atrocities were committed. This is a powerful work and worth reading, I highly recommend it. The translation of this work is exquisitely written. Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Random House | Hogarth for this ARC. This is my honest review.

This author is a master and I am so glad that she won the Nobel Prize in 2024. This is a newly translated to English release that will come out in early 2025. I definitely recommend this. It is haunting. She adds some history into this one which isn't always one of her elements. All of her books (the ones I have read) are amazing and I highly recommend all of them. This particular book is an excellent contribution to her body of work.

An absolutely incredible and profound story about the continuing cycle of intergenerational trauma and the suppression of the violent acts of the Jeju Uprising in 1948.

It’s harrowing. The dreamlike prose and often unreliable narration don’t make it an easy read but it’s not supposed to be. It’s a haunting depiction of violence and trauma, underscored by the human condition. You are put face to face with the violence, not to glorify it but to remember it.

Kang’s poetic prose is undeniably the strength of this novel, like many of her others. She has a way of writing that sticks in your brain and makes you think about certain passages over and over and over again. And what vivid metaphors, so deeply interwoven throughout the novel but without using any overly flowery language to exaggerate their points. I loved the feeling of the disjointed narrative, it really captured the essence of what it means to experience, remember, relive, and understand the trauma of a massacre. The literary choices felt very pointed.

Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is a favorite of mine so I was eager to read this new book. I was engaged at first and then I was so upset by the animal death that I had a hard time returning to the story. I was so depressed reading the book that I decided to take a break. Every time I thought about going back to it I just didn’t want to. I managed to start pick it up again once but it was bringing me down too much even though I tend to like melancholy stories. The writing is top notch but I just didn’t want to be in the world that was created, it’s too bleak even for me.
Thanks to NetGallery and the publisher for letting me read!

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the advanced copy of this book.

"We Do Not Part" by Han King is a profound and haunting story of two friends; one is asked to go to Jeju Island to care for her bird while she gets treatment in South Korea for an injury. The perilous journey to the island amidst a blizzard snowstorm and the journey to her friend's house is scary and treacherous. This weaves in the story of the massacres in South Korea and a past that most people want to forget about.

Highly recommend his beautifully written book.

This book was a wild ride - a bit of a fever dream where it was hard to tell what was real and what was imagined. It almost felt like two books in one. The first part of the book really set the stage to get Kyungha down to Jeju Island to deal with the home and pet of her friend who was in the hospital. The second part of the book is where reality and dreams get a little murky -- there's a big snowstorm, and all of a sudden Inseon is back at the home (a ghost? real? who knows) showing and explaining important parts of her family's and the island's history to Kyungha. The historical details of Jeju Island in the Korean war time come to light in Inseon's retelling. I will say, the writing was beautiful, but for me a few things didn't work. I wondered why the first part of the book was necessary when it seemed like a vehicle to get the characters to the place where the history of Jeju could be told - that seemed like the more urgent part of the story. Why not just write a historical fiction without the friend, the injury, the snowstorm? I also think, for me, not knowing about that period in Korean history I was left with gaps in my knowledge trying to understand what was being told in the story (that's more a me issue than a book issue I suppose). With that said, I learned some things and was glad to read an advanced copy of this book.