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.

Confession time, this book sounded fascinating which was why I requested it from Netgalley.

The reading started out brilliantly... the writing is really beautiful. Sentences that just linger and that invite you back to read them over.

All of that got lost for me though as I found myself needed to read passages over and over again to figure out what was going on in this very disjointed story. I knew absolutely nothing about a massacre that happened in Jeju, Korea in 1948 (I had to do a bit of a Google search to educate myself) and while the disjointedness of the story did not improve, I found that this dream-quest way of telling the story to make a bit more sense.

I wanted to find connections with the characters, but in the end... I just could not. I am not sure if the disjointed way of telling this story was the reason, but it certainly did not help. I also struggled to finish this book... I made myself just sit down and finish it. I have waited a few days to write my review, hoping that things would become clearer with some time and space... but they did not.

I would like to thank Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group - Random House | Hogarth for this digital copy to read. This book will be published January 21, 2025.

This book was challenging to read. The narrative felt disjointed, and it was often hard to follow which character each paragraph was focusing on, as the perspective shifted frequently. I found it difficult to grasp the history of the atrocities committed by Korean soldiers against Korean citizens, as this part of the story felt out of place and confusing, leaving me uncertain about the context and what was happening.

Kyungha has been asked by her friend Ineson to come see her. Ineson has had an accident with a circle saw
and is hospitalized. She asks Kyungha to travel to her home to take care of her bird. Kyungha endures a
perilous journey to Jeju due to the snow. Kyungha's nightmares are revealed along with details of Ineson's
family history and the 1948 Jeju uprising are revealed. Dreamlike sequences paint vivid pictures.
Story of friendship, family responsibility and history
#WeDoNotPart #RandomHouse #Hogarth #NetGalley

This novel was steeped in vivid imagery and engaging prose. There was a lot of ambiguity with certain aspects of the novel but I didn't feel like it retracted from the overall story. This novel definitely brings to life lost voices filled with love & friendship in the face of violence and horror.

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for an advance readers copy of this book.

In spare but lyrical language, like brush strokes on a page, author Han Kang paints a haunting picture of two women in Korea, friends who are both emotionally damaged, and who seek wholeness by exploring the history of two modern massacres.

The ambience is as blurry as the snowstorm in which the narrator makes her way, with a sense of unreality and unreliability. Although the tale begins in a grueling heat wave, we enter the story as the she describes a chilling nightmare, and continue as she outlines the eerie, isolated life she has chosen to be living, deliberately cut off from those she loves.

The desperate call from a friend leads Kyungha (we eventually learn her name) on a journey to save the friend’s pet bird, and to understand how two massacres, one in the early 1950’s and one in 1980, both hidden from the public, continue to plague the present.

Originally published in 2021, this is the first English translation by the 2024 Nobel Laureate in Literature. While written with delicacy and subtly, the story is grim and graphic, and often confusing. Despite the importance of bearing witness to such atrocities, I would not recommend it to the people I know.

This novel was so beautifully written, and I loved the way it explored deep-rooted friendship alongside historical and familial trauma. The language was beautiful and full of imagery and detail I could clearly picture throughout, and I was consistently moved by the women’s strength and sudden motivations to survive after wanting so badly to die. I did get confused sometimes about whose memories were being related and how they connected to Kyungha’s book, and I felt like while the ambiguity kept me engaged, I wanted a bit more closure in the end.