We Do Not Part

Kyungha is a writer plagued by insomnia and recurring nightmares, still shaken by the subject of her previous book. When her old friend Inseon, a former documentary maker who now works as a carpenter on Jeju Island, is hurt and asks her to come, Kyungha crosses the island in a snowstorm to look after Inseon's pet bird before it dies.

As the storm closes in and the power fails in Inseon's remote house, the journey slips between memory, dream and something harder to name. Kyungha recalls the friendship that brought the two women together, and the family history Inseon has been piecing together from archives, testimony and her mother's fragments of memory: the killing of villagers on Jeju by police and soldiers in the late 1940s and the grief that outlived it.

Originally published in Korean in 2021 as 작별하지 않는다, this is a novel about state violence and the work of remembering, about friendship, and about what it means to refuse to let the dead go. The English translation is by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. Han Kang's earlier books include The Vegetarian and Human Acts.