We Do Not Part

Unforgettable . . . A disquietingly beautiful novel about the impossibility of waking up from the nightmare of history. Hang Kang’s prose, as delicate as footprints in the snow or a palimpsest of shadows, conjures up the specters haunting a nation, a family, a friendship

Hernan Diaz

A visionary novel about history, trauma, art and its tremendous costs. Han Kang is one of the most powerfully gifted writers in the world. With each work, she transforms her readers, and rewrites the possibilities of the novel as a form

Katie Kitamura

Han Kang. Behind these two syllables lies a novelist in the image of her latest translated work, We Do Not Part: fine, precise prose, with a poetry that willingly plunges into the fantastic, but sufficiently complex to conceal, beneath its praise of dreams and the imaginary, an implacable depiction of human cruelty

Le Monde

One of the greatest living writers . . . She is a voice for women, for truth and, above all, for the power of what literature can be

Eimear McBride

[Han Kang’s] empathy for vulnerable, often female, lives is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose . . . She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose

Nobel Prize in Literature Committee

Bold and revelatory, disquieting and subversive, Han’s style is both spare and lyrical

Guardian

A courageous and gifted writer whose work has truly global resonance . . . [Han Kang’s] writing is nuanced, supple and precise

Irish Times

A chilling reminder of the terrible invisibility of people and events that are removed from us in space and time

The New York Times

Exquisite. Han’s radiant intensity, her singular ability to find connections between body and soul, and to experiment with form and style, are what make her one of the world’s most important writers

Los Angeles Times

A haunting exploration of friendship amid historical trauma

TIME

A novelist and poet of tremendous feeling and precision . . . We Do Not Part [is] a beautiful, mysterious story built around . . . a pogrom on Jeju Island after the Korean War, told from the perspective of three women characters

The New Yorker

Astonishing . . . [We Do Not Part]is a rewarding endeavor, especially for readers familiar with Han’s oeuvre who can recognize it as a mosaic that artfully pieces together her long-simmering ideas on reckoning with historical atrocities, fighting to expose state-concealed truths and finding connection in our shared humanity despite inevitable suffering

San Francisco Chronicle

A masterpiece of grief and memory

Slate

The very best kind of storytelling

Vulture

[Kang] draws American readers into foreign calamities that their own forebears had a hand in creating, and then offers a very limited kind of redemption—the chance to discover, for themselves, that legacy of shame

The Atlantic

[We Do Not Part] blows open the lid on a long-forgotten chapter of Korean history, celebrating the resiliency of life in the face of immense tragedy

Harper’s Bazaar

It is pain—whether from large-scale acts of violence or quietly self-inflicted wounds—that gives [Han’s] writing its uncomfortable vitality

Wall Street Journal

A dream-narrative of history, remembrance, and friendship rendered in [Han’s] complex, lyrical prose

Literary Hub

Even through the veil of translation, the quiet intricacy of the author’s prose glitters throughout . . . a mysterious novel about history and friendship [that] offers no easy answers

Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Han Kang offers a devastating indictment of her country’s past . . . The novel conjures a dreamlike feel amid its potent tales of suffering and cruelty, all leading to a final section that is simply stunning. Han pulls off a masterful meditation on what it’s like to be assaulted by an "endless spew of blood-soaked memories". In that finale, I was stopped short by the grace of one dazzling page, with its cascade of memorable images. These include a description of mental collapse as hundreds of fuses in one’s head blowing one by one, and a woman sleeping all day in a hospice, who reminds Khungha of "a sea where the high tide lasts forever". Han ends her magnificent novel on a beautifully beguiling note

Independent, ‘Novel of the month’

A masterpiece . . . We Do Not Part is both act of witness and a beautiful poetic object . . . It is a rare privilege to read a masterpiece so recently crafted, to know that the new prose you are reading (too fast!) will endure. We Do Not Part is an astonishing book

Anne Enright, Guardian

With patience and acute insight, [Han Kang] explores both the breadth and brutality of human cruelty, and the profound capacity of our species for tenderness . . . We Do Not Part strikes a match in the darkness, insists on the strength of sisterhood, and makes us believe that even the smallest of lives, the pulse of a bird’s heart, should matter

Financial Times

Han’s work – itself a radical form of outreach and connection, an attempt to feel into the painful lives of strangers – is highly original and moving. Although she refuses to look away from human cruelty, it is her glimmers of hope that are most affecting . . . There is, perhaps, no novelist working today who seems so devoted to interrogating the epistemic problem of suffering

New Statesman