Description: "One morning in December, Kyungha receives a message from her friend Inseon saying she has been hospitalized in Seoul and asking that Kyungha join her urgently. The two women have last seen each other over a year before, on Jeju Island, where Inseon lives and where, two days before this reunion, she has injured herself chopping wood. Airlifted to Seoul for an operation, Inseon has had to leave behind her pet bird. Bedridden, she begs Kyungha to take the first plane to Jeju to save the animal. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon's house at all costs, but the icy wind and snow squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save Inseon's bird-or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness which awaits her at her friend's house. There, the long-buried story of Inseon's family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in the archive painstakingly assembled at the house, documenting a terrible massacre on the island"--
Review Quotes: "A chilling reminder of the terrible invisibility of people and events that are removed from us in space and time."--The New York 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 "One of the world's most important writers."--Los Angeles Times "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."--The Guardian "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 "[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."--The Wall Street Journal"[Han's] abilities are at their most undeniable and radiant."--BookPage "A dream-narrative of history, remembrance, and friendship rendered in [Han's] complex, lyrical prose."--Literary Hub "Poetic language expertly describes the mysterious geography of Jeju as Han movingly illustrates how the massacre affected survivors as well as subsequent generations. The memory of a devastating episode that must not be forgotten is revived."--Library Journal, starred review "[We Do Not Part gifts] audiences with tragic terror, luminous insight, and ethereal glimmers of hope."--Booklist, starred review "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 "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, author of Intimacies "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. Unforgettable."--Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Trust "Haunting and dreamlike, this is a novel of secrets and silences."--Silvia Moreno-Garcia, bestselling author of Mexican Gothic and The Seventh Seal of Salome