We Do Not Part - Velha Estante

Hardcover, 375 pages

English language

Published 2025 by Hamish Hamilton.

ISBN:: 978-0-241-60026-9

(1 review)

One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—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 that awaits her at her friend’s house.

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost …

One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—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 that awaits her at her friend’s house.

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.

2 editions

Fionnáin reviewed We Do Not Part by 한강

Snowflakes don't melt

4 stars

Content warning Mention of Jeju genocide/massacres

Han Kang is a beautiful writer. She somehow expresses so much in a line, like in this book when the uncanny is perfectly presented as a sea with no waves. We Do Not Part is her most recent novel, and deals with two protagonists (the narrator and her friend Inseon) who have been friends for years. They decided to make an artwork together that appeared in a dream of our narrator, but that consumes Inseon because it becomes a vessel for her to tell the story of the massacres on Jeju Island in the 1940s and 1950s.

All of this is told in a dreamlike narrative where it's unclear if any character is in our worldly realm. The stories of those adults and children lost to that terrible history become more solid and concrete than those of our modern-day protagonists, and time becomes blurred. It is a beautiful and devastating novel, as most of Kang's work is.

One small complaint is on the coherence of the language, which I think may have been a problem with the translation, which might have been rushed by the publisher to profit from Kang's recent Nobel Prize.