This is the story of a friendship and of a deep trauma in the history of Korea.
The two women meet as students and reconnect when one has an accident and needs the other's help to save her beloved bird.
But this book is so much more than a story of friendship. It's a story of family, of history, and of brutal genocides that took place in Korea before, during, and after the 'Korean' War. It's a history I knew nothing of - one that hits very hard.
And it's a story of a deep friendship, with deep secrets and trauma and healing and dreams.
This novel was a complex read for me, and one that I had to reread parts of to keep the story line going. Definitely not an easy read or an easy subject. Very dreamlike.
Thanks to NetGalley and publisher Random House for the ARC.

We Do Not Part by Han Kang is a beautifully written, haunting exploration of friendship, memory, and historical trauma. I loved how she seamlessly weaves between different time periods and shifts in and out of reality—it creates a dreamlike, almost nightmarish atmosphere. The book’s mood of solitude really pulls you in, the backdrop of the snowstorm along with the atrocities depicted of the Jeju Massacre in the 1940s add to an over all hopelessness throughout. While it got to be a bit challenging at times, the lyrical prose and thought-provoking themes make it a rewarding read. Definitely a solid 4-star experience for fans of introspective, literary fiction.

This was my third book by Han Kang (I’ve read The Vegetarian and Greek Lessons). I love her writing, find her and her translators brilliant, and can’t get enough of her books. I think this is so far my favorite of her books, even if it’s also the darkest of the ones I’ve read.

The book starts off with Kyungha receiving a mysterious message from her friend Inseon. Hospitalized in Seoul, she asks Kyungha to go to Jeju island and feed her bird. She goes, taking the first plane out and finding herself in the middle of a blizzard as she makes her way to her friend’s remote home. From this point on, the book makes a bit of a turn. Without revealing too much, Han straddles the line between reality and dreams, masterfully weaving in details of the Jeju massacre in the months leading up to the Korean War.

The first part reminded me a lot of Jon Fosse’s A Shining (both books made me feel cold!). While in a lot of ways this part feels like a separate book from the rest, I was intrigued by the ways that Kyungha‘s journey to Jeju reflects the exile of other persons mentioned. There’s one character in particular that Kyungha meets at a bus stop that I kept reflecting on in the later account of the massacre.

I also think Han is doing something interesting with snow throughout the book. Not only is it a hostile element to Kyungha, there seems to be some connection between the magical and the otherworldly and the snow. It also plays a role in some of the stories told during the massacre. There are other objects that have dual meanings in the story, such as bloody fingers. I think there is a lot to unpack here and I’d love to re-read this at some point to make those connections.

Thank you very much to NetGalley and Hogarth for an ARC of this novel.

This never quite reaches the level of THE VEGETARIAN or GREEK LESSONS, but no one tells a heartbreaking, unrelentingly sad novel like Han Kang. Wow, this was a lot. I found the first half of this extremely compelling, but it lost me quite a bit in the second half. I struggled with its depiction of real life violent history through a dreamlike lens. It made me wonder about its success in portraying an important part of Korean history considering its parallel interest in art and filmmaking. Still, Kang is a one-of-a-kind author, an incredibly deserving Nobel Laureate. I will read everything she ever writes.

This book is more grounded than The Vegetarian so it was easier to understand (although it was still a bit bizarre.) Kyungha ends up on Jeju Island during a blizzard after her friend cuts off two fingers in a woodworking accident. Her task is to get to her friend's bird before it dies. But then the book takes a turn. It's not necessarily a bad turn because it tells the history of the Jeju Massacre. Having spent time in both Jeju and Daegu, it was interesting but disturbing to learn more about the massacre. I don't know if I'll ever fully appreciate how Han Kang blends genres but this book should give sophisticated readers lots to ponder and discuss.

This beautifully written novel depicts the horrors of trauma and takes place in the paradisiacal Jeju Island, a reconstructed land with a lot of scars in history and in its people, and it addresses the massacres during the late 40s and early 50s.

The novel opens when Kyungha, a writer hunted by nightmares after publishing her last book about a mass killing, is asked by her hospitalized friend Inseon, to look after her bird in her home located in Jeju Island. Snowstorm hits this place and what it could happen is uncertain but throughout the novel we can learn about the friend, her background, and some brutal stories of suffering and death.

The narrative is oniric at times and also includes recollections and different voices. Han Kang majestically can put pain into deep and lyrical words and the way she addresses trauma and manages to picture people hunted by dreams because of shocking events in their lives is really impressive.

I loved this novel and I think her research is remarkable because she really imprinted this story in all her senses and transmits through it all the pain in its wounds.

It was fascinating to find connections with her previous books, but as well it can also be as difficult and painful to read as in the others.
If you are a very sensitive reader, I'd suggest to check the TW.

Thank you Hogarth and Netgalley for this digital advanced copy.
Publication date: January 21st, 2025

Absolutely haunting with lyrical writing that truly does blend the realms of dream and reality. The Vegetarian and Greek Lessons are books that follow me to this day, and We Do Not Part is joining in their ranks - possibly in the most straightforward way. This is a perfect, perfect winter read that explores the loneliness and desolution of the season - so please be warned for very open and honest discussions of suicidal ideation - while also engaging with a portion of history that I had no idea about and am glad to have learned more of. History and magical realism go so well together, and Han Kang illustrates that perfectly here.

We Do Not Part is the highly anticipated new novel from Han Kang after recently winning the Nobel Peace Prize in literature largely tied to The Vegetarian. She was awarded this prize for "“her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” This statement could not be more true in We Do Not Part.

This is the perfect book to pick up in the winter. The snowy setting feels like a character in itself. But pick this up when you are prepared to work for a pay off. Kang does not hand you anything, but the investment is oh so worth it. We open with Kyungha receiving an urgent message from her injured friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon begs Kyungha to return to head to her home on Jeju Island to save her pet bird. Kyungha does this immediately and is greeted with a vicious snowstorm that threatens her very existence and blurs the lines between dream and reality for the reader.

It's a little hard to talk about what makes this book great without spoiling some of its greatness. Kang is exploring trauma from the Korean War and the power of memory through the friendship between these two women. I'm not going to lie, I thought about giving up on this book when I truly had no grasp on what was going on or why, but I am SO GLAD the gorgeous sentences kept me reading. The ending of this book absolutely floored me and cemented it as a book I'll be talking about all year. I know I need to read Human Acts soon, but I can't stress enough how important timing can be with Kang's works. Read when you can give it the time and attention it demands!

WE DO NOT PART is Han Kang’s most recently published novel with the English translation forthcoming in January 2025, where she revisits another part of Korean history that has been largely suppressed by the government—the 1948 Jeju Uprising/Massacre when 30,000 people were killed. As we saw in HUMAN ACTS with the Gwangju Uprising/Massacre, with WE DO NOT PART, Kang has once again given a voice to the voiceless, to the forgotten, to the ones waiting.

On the surface, this is about a writer named Kyungha, a novelist, who is struggling with her mental health in the aftermath of her latest book about a massacre. When her longtime friend, Inseon, reaches out for her help after an accident, Kyungha finds herself on her way to Jeju island in the middle of a snowstorm. The book explores the dynamics of their friendship through their history and decision to create a joint art installation remembering the lives lost in 1948—a project that never comes into fruition. Until Inseon decides to start work on it herself and gets into an accident.

Before I go any further, it’s important to note that this book begins where HUMAN ACTS ends. Immediately we see Kyungha having intense and harrowing nightmares—an experience Han can attest to and has publicly acknowledged after writing about the 1980 Gwangju Uprising/Massacre in HUMAN ACTS. In fact, the dream in the opening chapter of WE DO NOT PART that serves as a the inspiration of the art installation project is a dream Han has dreamed herself back in 2014 upon finishing HUMAN ACTS, a deeply personal book for her. The last chapter of HUMAN ACTS can be seen as a prologue to this book, and thus, WE DO NOT PART should be seen as a continued meditation of trauma and “profound love” (지극한 사랑), which is how Han herself describes this book.

In WE DO NOT PART, Han explores the lasting trauma of the Jeju Uprising/Massacre and the shared mourning of that horrific event between friends and between a nation and its people. And she does this with such beautiful precision and craftsmanship. The book is full of symbolism and metaphors that not only carry the thematic issues of suffering, loss, grief, healing, and finally, memorialization of those lost, but also provide bridges to her other works. In this book, snow serves as a metaphor for its cyclical nature—a reminder that this intergenerational trauma is also cyclical, that the snow that quietly covered and buried the 30,000 dead was/is the same rain and snow that falls on us today. As Inseon says, “every time it snows, tit comes back. I try not to think about it, but it keeps coming back.” Snow also ties back to another one of Han’s work, THE WHITE BOOK, where she explores the loss of her sister through white objects. While THE WHITE BOOK is about a personal loss versus a national one, it is another meditation on loss and one that I need to urgently finish.
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There are also very small nuanced moments that are so specifically Jeju that evoke beautiful but painful imagery—specifically, my favorite, were the red camellia flowers against the white snow. For Koreans, this is an obvious one, since camellia flowers are very common on Jeju island and it’s significance even more profound as this flower is worn as a remembrance for those whose lives were lost on 4:3 or the Jeju Uprising/Massacre. But for many Western readers I think this is a nuanced cultural expression that may not resonate but hope in reading this might appreciate. In Korea, the camellia flower means 기다림 (to wait) and wearing it is a symbol of memorial and remembrance to Jeju people who lost their lives and the bereaved families who are still waiting for justice and recognition. And with the current South Korean government, reconciliation in the near future seems unlikely.

This book is not only extremely important because of Han Kang’s well deserved win of the Nobel Prize in Literature, but because of the urgent need in preserving the true historical events of Korea. Han, who was once blacklisted by the South Korean government for writing HUMAN ACTS and her persistence to write about the struggle of humanity is the reason why she won the Nobel Prize and why it is imperative that the rest of the world read this book and all of her books.
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It took 7 years for her to write this book. She wrote this with the intent of exploring the depth of humanity and with it, she found profound love. And I wholeheartedly agree.
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Reading WE DO NOT PART was an a surreal experience especially now during the live-streaming of a g3n0cid3 happening before our eyes. The reminder that our struggles are all connected is strong and decades later, even now, I am reminded that we are not free until all of us are free.
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Thank you so much to @hogarthbooks for this review copy. I will treasure it forever.

Kang decidedly explores themes of the permanence of people and their tragedies in our lives. Focusing on the Jeju Massacre, we follow a friend of a documentarian, who suddenly shifts to focus on "ghosts" from her past. The narrator follows the friend to a hospital and then eventually to Jeju, where the narrator begins to see the psychological and cultural remnants of the massacre.

Fans of Human Acts will enjoy the social and cultural commentary about the impacts of mass-scale tragedy. The pacing is fast. and I was glued to the novel.

Once in a while I will come upon a book that ticks every single box of things that I have a very strong personal connection to and this book will have a hold on my heart and mind for years to come. This one is one of them.

One of the criticisms I've noticed repeated for We Do Not Part is that nothing happens and the plot is too vague. And while that's not entirely incorrect, I also do not consider this a criticism. This is a novel that's meant to be savored page by page, like a meditation on the present and the past. The events take place over the course of a couple of days and they're painstakingly recounted in minute detail over the course of the novel with intermissions of Inseon's documentary interviews. The macro-focus on the snow and the cold and the suffering of traveling through a snow storm; the intermittence of hallucinatory ghosts and recurring nightmares--all of it overlays over the echoes of generational trauma in a way that seeps into your bones.

At its core, this is a horror novel. About the atrocities of genocide and war, about being haunted by the past, about being stranded all alone with no one to witness your death but lonely ghosts. But at the same time, Han Kang was able to inlay the paragraphs with a certain warmth and tactility. Every description of Kyungha's best friend Inseon is infused with such vivid familiarity, their interactions full of quiet understanding that comes only from knowing someone well for a long time. The way Inseon dresses, the way she holds herself, the way she speaks, the way her house carries traces of her when she's not there--all of it is written with such aching care. So in a way this is also a love letter to a dear friend who carries the same hauntings and who can understand your pain and the holes in your heart better than you can.

Ultimately, this is a eulogy to thousands upon thousands of people who were silently mass executed in the war during the years of 1948-1950. Despite the horrors, Han Kang takes time to be so gentle. Every description of the falling snow, the way it feels to touch the feathers of a breathing bird, the slow fall of wax down a candle. There is a line, that I think encapsulates what this novel is in a nutshell:

<blockquote>As a child, I read that ultra-fine particles of dust or ash had to be present for a snowflake to form. And that clouds were not only made of suspended water droplets but were full of dust and ash that rose from the ground with water vapor.</blockquote>

The ashes and dust of everyone that has parted are still with us, falling from the sky as snow, so we do not say farewell.

Thank you for netgalley and the publisher for the ARC copy.

Wanted to love but couldn’t find my footing in this text. I had high expectations going in and perhaps it was too over my head.

This book is beautifully translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. Kyungha, a writer, struggles with debilitating migraines and often finds herself so nauseous she can’t eat. One day she gets a call from Inseon, a photographer and woodcarver she collaborated with on a documentary about the Jeju Uprising. Inseon has suffered a terrible accident in her woodshop and, because she is as solitary as Kyungha, she needs someone to immediately go to her home on Hallasan to rescue her bird. If Kyunhga doesn’t leave now, the bird will die. The journey to the hinterlands of Jeju is not easy. Her struggle to get to Inseon’s house begins to take on the air of the supernatural. Kyungha has to walk most of the way, through the deep snow and growing dark in her inadequate clothing. At this point, cold, hungry, tired, in pain from a migraine, Kyungha starts to drift through time. She slowly reveals the long, terrible history of the Jeju Uprising, a history that was illegal to speak of for decades under the repressive South Korean government. What really struck me about the book was the way that Kyungha settled into a peaceful acceptance of the past.

Thank you Netgalley for this eARC!

When Kyungha’s oldest and dearest friend, Inseon, ends up in the hospital following an accident, she asks Kyungha to make the journey to her remote home on Jeju Island to rescue her pet bird, Ama. The trip becomes a reckoning for Kyungh, who has recently completed a writing project and proposed a joint project with Inseon about the Jeju 4.3 incident, a harrowing, violent, but little-known period in Korean history, whose impact is still felt throughout the island Inseon calls home.

I don’t even know where to start with this one. It’s a beautiful piece of literature I will be thinking about and referring to for so long after I’ve finished it. It feels like it’s a part of me now. Why? Because it’s not only an amazing piece of writing, but it touches amazingly and deeply on a part of history that I’ve never heard of before - despite so many people dying and my country being so involved.

Han Kang opens the readers’ eyes with such amazing imagery and symbolism, intermixing it with direct stories of the violence and brutality that plagued the island during that period, it provides such an amazing contrast. And using the characters of Kyungha and Inseon (and Inseon’s family) to tell the story was very effect and personal.

This book won’t be for everyone, as I said, it’s definitely very heavy on the symbolism and unfolds like a dream sequence, so people who like more straightforward stories will probably have a harder time with this one. But if you’re willing to spend some time with a story that’s more flowing slowly, almost like a work of art that needs interpreting and sitting with, then this will be a great book for you.

It also will show you a part of Korean history that needs to talked about.

Thank you to Net Galley and Hogarth for the ARC. I was excited to read this, but I think I am not the right audience for this. I prefer books with a faster pacing, and a plot and characters that are interesting.

Originally published in 2021, We Do Not Part explores the massive psychological imprint and mental ramifications left behind on a single individual by the horrors of the Jeju Uprising, a catalyst to the Korean War. It is a quiet, yet bold warning of the destruction of political censorship, as well as a deeply personal and heartbreaking feminist character study.
Written in Kang’s signature poetic style, it does feel very stream of consciousness, weaving fluidly through both the real and not real, as well as what is immediate and what is memory. Flashbacks are not so much set scenes of horrific destruction and sadness, but rather a constant presence shading the edges of Kyungha’s reality and affecting both how she perceives the world and her loyalty to Inseon. In that regard, the concept of We Do Not Part isn’t just a titular callout recognizing the interhuman bonds formed by trauma and survival, but also an adage expressing one’s personal relationship with their own memory and grief. We do not part, because we cannot separate ourselves from our own past.
Despite being difficult to process at times, I cannot think of a single person who shouldn’t read this book. It is a map providing knowledge to a previously hidden aspect of important cultural history, and it does so by engaging and imploring the reader on a personal level. Essentially it turns a set of dates on a timeline into a visceral and tangible series of events that have had lasting consequences on the populations of several countries including Korea, Japan, and the USA. However, this is not a globe spanning narrative. It is the story of a woman, and what surviving in the wake of war looks like.

· Name of the publication/blog/outlet: posted to Instagram (@abrittlebee), Goodreads, and Storygraph

· Run date for when the review will be posted/published: review was published December 23rd, 2024 on Instagram, and on Storygraph and Goodreads on December 30th, 2024

links to the reviews have been submitted with NetGalley Title Feedback

I don’t even know what to say about this book that would do it any justice. It is a story that pulled me in and brought me to tears in many ways. I am gutted by the history here and the long term effects of it. I highly recommend this story. I read a NetGalley copy. I am a huge fan of Han Kang’s work and will always read the next book.

We Do Not Part (Korean title: I Do Not Bid Farewell) tells the story of the massacres committed in Jeju Island between 1948, first by the Japanese occupiers, and later masked as part of the anti-communist campaign, many of the remains in mass graves that remain uncovered to this day.


Han Kang is a truly gifted writer, with beautiful, although sometimes heady, prose. She tells the story of two friends' search for the truth, a woman's untiring search for a missing brother and husband. It tackles topics of aging and dementia, depression, captivity, torture, ethnic cleansing and genocide. All told in a dark, brooding, mysterious tone, set in an isolated cabin in a remote island village during a snowstorm.

<i>At some point, as the materials piled up and began to take on a clearer form, I could feel myself changing. To the point where it seemed nothing one human being did to another could ever shock me again . . .

It’s no coincidence that some thirty thousand people were killed on this island that winter, and another two hundred thousand were murdered on the mainland the next summer. The governing US military ordered that everyone on the island, all roughly three hundred thousand people, be wiped out if that’s what it took to stop their communization, and members of the Seocheong, the extreme-right Northwest Youth League, who were from the north and locked and loaded with willingness and resentment, entered the island dressed in police and army uniforms after two weeks of training. Then the coastal blockade and media blackout followed, the murderous impulse to point a gun at an infant’s head was not only allowed but rewarded—to the extent that children under the age of ten who were killed in this way numbered one and a half thousand—and shortly after this war broke out, and following the precedent here, if one can call it that when the blood has barely dried, they culled around two hundred thousand people from cities and villages throughout the country, transported them in trucks, incarcerated them, shot them, buried them in mass graves—and then prohibited any and all from claiming and collecting the remains. The war not being over, after all, but merely suspended. As the enemy remains, just over the Armistice Line. As not only shunned and stigmatized families but everyone else kept mum under threat of being branded an enemy sympathizer the moment they opened their mouths. Decades passed in the meantime, decades down in the valleys, the mine, beneath the runway, decades before the mounds of marbles and small skulls shot through with bullet holes were excavated, and still to this day there are bones upon bones that remain buried.

Those children.
Children killed in the name of extermination.</i>

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for providing a digital ARC for review.

Han Kang is an incredible writer, though I found parts of this book to be a bit challenging to track, including some of the historical detail.

An intensely illuminating book on the powers of friendship and the grips that the past can have. Kyungha is tasked by her friend, who recently was in an accident and hospitalized, to go to her village and take care of her precious bird. As Kyungha makes the trek through a treacherous blizzard and snow storm to get to her friends house, she reflects upon her friend's life. Paralleling her journey with that of her friend's parents and family, we are immersed into an intensely frigid world, that leaves catastrophes in it's wake. This was a powerful story and I loved the alternating timelines, and POVs.