Thanks to Random House for the ARC of the novel.

When I finished reading Han Kang's *We Do Not Part*, I had to sit back in my comfy chair and pause. What had I just read? Was it a ghost story? Do the main characters, Inseon and Kyungha, exist in the "real" world or have they moved on to some other plane of existence? Even now, I am finding it difficult to write about the novel not because I did not enjoy it--I did--but because I don't think I can convey exactly the emotions I felt upon finishing it.

I guess the difficulty for me lies in the contrast between beautiful writing on one hand and horrific content on the other. I had the same feeling when I read *The Story of a Brief Marriage* by Anuk Arudpragasam years ago. Just such a well-written novel to tell such a heart-breaking story.

And *We Do Not Part* is a heart-breaking story. There just is no other way to describe it. There is so much love in this novel, between family, between friends, pitted against so much human evil. There is a line in the novel where one of the characters comes to realize that "love was a terrible agony." *We Do Not Part* makes one realize to what extent that is true as the characters suffer unimaginable horror, and one can't help but come to the realization that the more one loves, the more one can suffer. *We Do Not Part* is a novel that will make you aware of the true weight of what you mean when you say "I love you" to someone in your life.

It is difficult to read novels that make you confront just how bad we humans can be towards one another. But in the end, these novels, like *We Do Not Part*, give one a little hope that love will eventually win out. One may--probably will--suffer agony because we love. There will be death, destruction, devastation. But somehow, if we can still love, we will be able to go on as Inseon and Kyungha do, seemingly overcoming time and space to be with one another.

A moving, haunting book.

Despite its award-winning status, We Do Not Part left me somewhat underwhelmed. While the novel explores intriguing themes of friendship, memory, and survival in a beautifully atmospheric setting, the slow pacing and disjointed narrative made it difficult for me to fully engage. The boundary between dream and reality, though meant to add depth, often felt confusing rather than compelling. Although the book brings to light an important, forgotten chapter of Korean history, the storytelling didn’t resonate with me as much as I had hoped.

How exciting is it that Han Kang is the first Asian woman to win a Nobel prize? Murakami is kicking the air, I just know it. But while I’m super happy a Korean woman won the Nobel prize, I’m not going to sugarcoat my review of this book.

First, the translation. Felt choppy and weird. I think a lot of hidden meaning went untranslated. But regardless of the translation, I still didn’t enjoy this book. I felt like Han lost sight of what she was trying to write. This was an ambitious book and I’m not sure Han was able to reach that goal.

By the end of this book, I had lost sight of the main character. Instead, I felt like I was reading a historical textbook. I also completely lost interest in the main character because she was so useless to the plot. The summary of this book mentioned friendship between women, but I didn’t see any of that. This book was just a dry retelling of a very horrific historical event that happened in Jeju.

Regardless, I’m super happy that Han received the 2024 Nobel prize and literature. I think it’s a huge accomplishment for Asian and female authors and I would never take away from that just because I didn’t like her book. I’ll probably be in the minority when it comes to my views on this book.

A powerful book centered around a friendship and traumatizing and devastating historical events in Korea. The writing is visceral, and there are tons of interesting imagery. As a reader, you have to put in the work with this novel, but the experience will reward you for doing so. Kang is a force.

SIDE NOTE: This review will have spoilers in it. I highly recommend reading the book first.

I usually don’t write super long, detailed reviews, but for this book, I feel like I have to. Han Kang continues to show her mastery of the craft with each book of hers I read, and this one was just as devastating as Human Acts without being the same book. She’s just… amazing.

We Do Not Part is a novel about healing, about trauma, about the horrors of war and the steps government will take to cover it up, about genocide, and about the mental toll of taking care of the dead and dying. I will try to cover these things to the best of my ability in this review, but if there is anything I missed, please, let me know.


My General Feelings

This book is a confrontation of the self for me. When I read it, each new page felt like a new awakening to horror upon horror. Each new page felt like a dead body that was demanding to be picked apart, to be dissected, to be known.

All I can say here is that Han Kang is a genius and truly an author of our era. She knows how to write these topics in a personal, poetic way, without bashing things over your head to make sure you get it. Instead, repetition feels like being forced to look at horrific things on, say, the news, and come to terms with it. Kang, if you’re reading this (I doubt it), know that you deserved that Nobel Prize, no matter what.

Like I said earlier, this book is a confrontation. This book forces you to look at yourself and the world around you, and on an even smaller scale, the people around you, and ask yourself, “How do we do this?” Every new anecdote, newspaper clipping, writing, is a new look at the world. It was eye-opening to say the least.

Another thing to note is the fact that a lot of the action takes place in part 2 of the book. In part one, it is more about Kyungha’s (our main character) journey to Inseon’s remote cabin. While there are deeper notes there I could touch on, in this review, I will be focusing more on part 2.

And as an extra note here, the translators did amazing. Even though they are different from her usual translator (Deborah Smith), they managed to capture the feeling of her prose that Smith captured in Kang’s previous works.


The Horrors of War and Genocide

”The soldiers were hurling bodies into the ocean, and people lay bloodied, their faces in the sand. At first I thought they were clothes floating on the water, but it turned out they were all people, dead people.”

It was horrific to read this book. It was even more horrific knowing this wasn’t just fiction.

Just like in Human Acts, Kang does what she does best: putting horrific violence and persecution into a personal lens. What she did in Human Acts and what she did here was not only tell the story of violence, but she told it through a person that we have a connection to.

Here, it was Inseon, our main character’s friend. The story of Jeju Island and the horrors done to it and its people is told through Inseon, whose mother was a survivor of these things. Inseon is trying to collect her mother’s legacy and carry it on, and hopefully find her dead uncle’s remains in the process. The genius of this choice is how it isn’t too personal to where we are drowning in the depression and grief of Inseon, but not too far removed to where we don’t care that much about the story.

What makes the horrors of war so prevalent and poignant here is that they already happened. We are looking at the lost stories of so many lives cut short, and we are looking at something that we can never change. These people are gone. The horrors done to them have been deliberately destroyed (more on that later), and we can’t help. For me, that was the most affecting part. I was reading page after page of horror after horror, and even more horrors that were untold, and they all happened so long ago that I am forced to sit and watch.

”Extermination was the goal. Exterminate what? The reds.”
“The governing US military ordered that everyone on the island, all roughly 300,000 people, be wiped out if that’s what it took to stop their communization…”

As for the genocide, I feel like it is the right word to describe what happened on Jeju. Even though the supposed goal was to “exterminate the reds”, on a deeper level, the goal was to get rid of the Jeju Islanders who were disagreeing with the government.

Now, I’m not sure if Kang agrees with me, but the language she used describing some of the scenes echoes descriptions of the Holocaust terminology: efficiency of killing, exterminating, and there’s a scene where a soldier uses extreme terms while talking to an inmate:

”We’ll slaughter every last one of you commie sons of bitches, wipe you clean off the face of the earth. We’ll stamp the life out of you if there’s even a drop of red in you.”

It all spoke to me as a pointing to the occurrence of genocide.


Covering Up

”And, as I’m sure you know, they estimate that at least a hundred thousand people died nationwide. I nod, even as I turn these words over in my mouth: They killed a lot more than that, didn’t they?”

A major theme of both Human Acts and We Do Not Part was that the government covered this all up. With We Do Not Part it was a major focus, due to the fact that we focus on Inseon and her mother’s journey to piece together where Inseon’s uncle went, and on that journey they face multiple obstacles, namely the fact that they cannot and probably will never be able to find the uncle’s bones because the government stopped excavating the mass graves and won’t excavate them any time soon (from what we’re told).

It’s implied, but not explicitly said, that the stopping of government excavations was the intentional want to cover up what happened on Jeju. And like I said, that’s a common theme: from trying to find paperwork to newspapers to photos, it’s a struggle to obtain them, because the government was blocking access.

And it hurts when you get the news that the government stopped excavating, because you can feel the weight and you can feel the feelings of the families there knowing that they may never find their loved ones ever again.

It hurts.


The Toll of Taking Care of the Dying

”The truth is, I wanted to die. It was my only thought for a long while.”

For the final category, I chose to do something that was only a brief mention in the final chapter of the book, but was very poignant for me. And that was Inseon discussing the difficulty of taking care of her dying, trauma ridden mother.

At the end of this book, there is a segment where Inseon describes in great detail what her life was like with her mother- and how difficult it was. I feel like this is a topic not very talked about here, due to the fact that we are supposed to take care of the dying and not complain, even when there is a severe mental toll. Of course, Inseon had a higher mental toll because her mother was screaming for help from her trauma, but that doesn’t erase the fact that taking care of the dying is an incredibly arduous task.


Quote Collection

There will be one from each chapter.


“I’m leaving you so I can breathe. I want to live, not be half-dead.”

“A child of thirteen clinging to her seventeen-year-old sister as if her sister wasn’t a child herself, hanging on by a sleeve, too scared to see but unable to look away.”

“I don’t understand it. She is neither kin nor acquaintance. She’s only a stranger I happened to stand beside at a bus stop. Why then do I feel in turmoil, as if I’ve just bid someone farewell?”

“I don’t know if this is what happens right before you die. Everything I have ever experienced is made crystalline. Nothing hurts anymore.”

“I didn’t care enough let alone love her to be feeling such grief.”

“As if the moment we touched, one of us might spread our death to the other.”


“Was there such a thing as wanting to see when all that remained of you was your shadow?”

“All to build their earthly paradise, but what kind of paradise is hell?”

“In every story, without exception, the woman looks back. She turns to stone on the spot… And for what? What has she kept turning back to see?”

“It’s the strangest thing, but more than the unspeakable torture I experienced… more than the years I spent locked up without cause, it’s that woman’s voice that still haunts me.”

“How much further into these depths can we go? Is this the silence that lies below the ocean in my dream?”

“...and still to this day there are bones upon bones that remain buried. Those children. Children killed in the name of extermination.”

masterful work by han kang. i absolutely love her writing style, characterization, everything, she deserves all her flowers and more

Han Kang just won the nobel prize for literature and what an excellent choice. Even better that she refuses to celebrate.

Han Kang’s latest novel weaves an intricate and haunting tale, blending ghostly elements with South Korea's tragic history. The story opens with Kyungha, an author suffering from debilitating headaches and nightmares, which she believes stem from her research on the Gwangju Uprising—similar to Han’s Human Acts. Unable to escape these disturbing visions, Kyungha isolates herself, until an old friend, Inseon, summons her for help.

Inseon, recovering from an accident in Seoul, needs Kyungha to travel to Jeju Island to care for her pet bird, Ama. Kyungha’s journey through relentless winds and snow takes on an existential quality, moving her from the trauma of Gwangju to the devastating history of Jeju 4:3, a massacre in 1948 during which thousands were killed. Inseon’s mother, Jeongsim, survived the Jeju atrocities, but most of her family perished, leaving a legacy of pain that continues to shape Inseon’s life.

As Kyungha reaches Jeju, she discovers documentation compiled by Jeongsim and later Inseon, revealing that the horrific visions haunting her dreams originated on Jeju. The boundary between reality and imagination begins to blur as Han intersperses Kyungha’s journey with survivor testimonies, detailing mass graves and unclaimed bodies of family members.

Han’s narrative explores themes of mourning, remembrance, and healing, not only focusing on Jeju 4:3 but also touching on similar atrocities in Busan and Daegu. She delves into the psychology of human cruelty, while suggesting the possibility of collective healing through solidarity and remembrance.

Although the pacing may seem slow to some, the austere prose punctuated by lyrical moments creates a hypnotic effect. While Human Acts led Han to despair, she found writing this novel to be cathartic, and its conclusion hints at cautious optimism.

Gratitude to Netgalley and the publisher for an early copy of this (now Nobel Prize-winning!) author's latest work.

Thank you NetGalley and Random House for the opportunity to read this eARC!

This is the first novel that I have read by Han Kang so I was not familiar with her style of writing but I think after reading this, I am hooked.

What I loved about this book was Kang's attention to detail and utmost respect for the traumatic periods of time that she included in the novel. The Jeju Island massacre was the overall focus of We Do Not Part, not in the time period, but in the generational trauma that it has instilled on those who were a part of the massacre and those who came after. I had to do some research to understand the full implications but the memory building done by Kang was extremely powerful and was able to connect me to those impacted by this tragedy in a way that research could not. The imagery that Kang is able to invoke with her poetic writing is also very powerful. I cannot wait to read more of her novels.

My only criticism was that there were some plot points that were never expanded upon or that were left in the dust. I had some unanswered questions by the end of the book that were never touched upon and I am someone who does enjoy concrete answers.

Overall, I would recommend grabbing We Do Not Part once it is released!

Having read The Vegetarian a while ago and loved it, I was naturally eager for a new novel from Han Kang.
I did like the ambience and Kang's writing, but this time I couldn't connect or relate to the characters. Also, the historical side of it didn't clique with me.
It turned out to be just...fine. I'll dare say I wasn't in the proper mood for such a story like this one, so I might consider giving this book another chance when it is officially published.
Yet, I do recommend it to readers who have read any books by this author before and enjoyed it.

Thank you, NetGalley and the publisher Hogarth, for providing me with an ARC of this novel.

We Do Not Part by Han Kang is an emotionally intense exploration of love, grief, and the fragility of human relationships. Through lyrical prose, the novel follows characters grappling with the deep scars of loss and the haunting presence of those they can no longer reach. Kang's writing is both delicate and powerful, weaving an intricate tapestry of memory, pain, and the complexities of emotional connection. The novel confronts the difficult themes of separation and mourning with a quiet but devastating force, leaving the reader with a profound sense of reflection. We Do Not Part is a deeply moving, thought-provoking read that lingers long after the final page.

This was an interesting book but I didn’t really connect with it. I liked the friendship storyline between the two women but the book was pretty abstract. Not something I would typically read but I still enjoyed it overall

Thank you to NetGalley, to the author, and to the publishers for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!!!

I chose to read this author because of an excerpt from her previous book, used in a writing workshop. Another interesting aprt of it was the translation. I am learnign Japanese, so translations are on my radar now. The language is beautiful engaging. The subject is not easy for me to read.

Thank you to Hogarth and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Han Kang’s newest novel, We Do Not Part, follows two women, Kyungha and Inseon, and their friendship. When Inseon is sent to Seoul to be hospitalized, she tasks Kyungha with helping her save her pet bird back in her home in Jeju.
Kang’s latest work is filled with imagery of snow and shadows which accompany the narrative’s retrospective writing. The plot explores different points of Korean history such as the Korean War, the Japanese occupation, and the Jeju uprising (Jeju April 3 incident), highlighting the difficulty of revisiting traumatic events. The narrative is informative and introduces readers to Korean history through fiction. Likewise, Paige Aniyah Morris and e. yaewon provide a compelling English translation of Kang’s prose.

In my experience with Kang’s work, we start with a melancholy unease that develops into a darker unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach. The cause is elusive - is it the prose? The subject matter? The atmosphere? In this case, it’s all three. I read We Do Not Part over a week and a half, and was feeling oddly detached and confused by it for the first 50% of the novel. We follow our main character as she lets us in to her isolated, depressed days, soon disrupted by an urgent favour for an old friend. I can tell that Kang was carefully building up to facing the tragic history of the Jeju uprising, but reading this book in fragments made it difficult for me to see, much less appreciate, the big picture. The second half of the novel, Kang plunges us into the heaviness of “remembering”, the legacy of trauma that is passed on through blood and bone, the fallibility of parents that lived through our worst imaginings. I need to revisit this work, as I can imagine devoting time to reading it with more continuity would made it hit even harder. Despite my elongated read, I still found it moving, heartbreaking, and eerie. Recommended to those that have read Kang’s work or folks that are intrigued by the way land holds memories and tragedy can’t be forgotten if it is passed on.

This is Han Kang at her best; if you like the way she explores abstract concepts with imagery and embodiment, you will like this as well. It is a more experimental style, so it will not be for everyone.

Between 1948 and 1950 an estimated 30,000 inhabitants of the small Korean island of Jeju were murdered as part of a scorched earth policy to eradicate presumed Communist rebels on the island. Entire villages within an established perimeter were burnt down and men, women and children executed on beaches and in caves.

For decades, the government-led massacre was swept under the carpet, but since the early 2000s a truth commission has carried out an independent investigation and the horrible facts have been documented and brought to light.

Han Kang takes on the difficult task of fictionalising the 'Jeju massacre', and she pulls it off. 'We Do Not Part' is not a historical novel though, it retains Han Kang's unique style, playing with dreams and supernatural elements and also the vivid descriptions of excruciating pain and cruelty.

As in The Vegetarian and Human Acts we have a female protagonist, Kyungha, unable to cope with the demands of normal life. One day, Kyungha receives a call from her artist friend, Inseon, who needs her help urgently - she has sown off her fingers. The second half of the novel is more engaged, as it largely describes the massacre by way of presentating the research carried out by Inseon and discovered by Kyungha.

I found it really beautifully done - the snowy, dreamlike island with its silent secrets and the friendship between the two women struggling to find a way to recover and remember.

Much of this book read like a fever dream and this approach to exploring memory and legacies left me a little confused at parts. It's a style that will draw some in, but repel others. It left me more curious about the history of Jeju, which I have encountered more in other novels that center the haenyo.

This book is so many things. It’s a fever dream about friendship and also about how trauma from a previous generation can still haunt you today.

It opens with Kyungha, who is left in a deep, debilitating depression from the last book that she wrote. As she is coming out of it and starting to resume life, she gets a text from her friend, Inseon. Kyungha flies out to join her in Seoul, where she has been hospitalized for an accident. Unable to go herself Inseon asks that Kyungha goes to her home in Jeju to rescue her bird, who has been left without someone to care for it in her absence. As Kyungha makes the journey to save the bird, she struggles to survive the heavy snowfall as day turns into a very cold night. When she makes her way to the house, she is confronted with the story of Inseon’s family as told by second hand memories from her mother about the Jeju massacre.

The writing is absolutely captivating. The imagery and atmosphere are so immersive that it invokes sensation throughout my entire body. It really brought the story alive in a way that I haven’t experienced before. The way that the past and present are connected throughout the book is an art form. This seems like a book you get more and more from with each time you read it.

I loved The Vegetarian. This one didn’t work for me, the narration style was difficult for me to connect with.