We Do Not Part – Kang Han (2025)

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2024, Han Kang offers a haunting and visionary novel that journeys from contemporary South Korea into its painful history. Beginning one morning in December, the story follows Kyungha as she travels from Seoul into the forests of Jeju Island to the home of her old friend Inseon. Hospitalized after an accident, Inseon has asked Kyungha to hurry there and feed her beloved pet bird, which will otherwise die. Kyungha takes the first plane to Jeju, but a snowstorm strikes the island as soon as she arrives, plunging her into a world of white. Battling icy winds and snow squalls, she wonders whether she will reach the bird in time or even survive the terrible cold surrounding her at every step. As night falls, she struggles towards Inseon’s house, unaware of the darkness awaiting her. There, the long-buried history of Inseon’s family comes to light through dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, as well as a painstakingly assembled archive documenting a terrible massacre on the island seventy years earlier. This novel is a hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination and, above all, an indictment of forgetting. Translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris.