We Do Not Part

Han Kang's novel braids a present-day errand of mercy, caring for a friend's pet bird during a snowstorm, into the buried history of the Jeju massacre, where tens of thousands were killed by South Korean forces in the late 1940s. The device of moving between a small domestic obligation and mass atrocity could easily feel forced, but reviewers have pointed to the strength of the historical reportage sections in particular, where documentary specificity gives the novel's more dreamlike passages their weight. It's a book about the impossibility of fully attending to historical horror while still being asked, urgently, to attend to it, and Han refuses to let the reader look away from either register. The prose stays spare even as the material gets overwhelming.