We Do Not Part

We Do Not Part

Han Kang, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris

#357 of 8,085 books · #22 in Horror

Won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (2025). Also shortlisted or longlisted for 1 other award.

We Do Not Part won the Nobel Prize in Literature 2024 and was shortlisted for the Foyles Book of the Year 2025 and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Beginning one morning in December, We Do Not Part traces the path of Kyungha as she travels from the city of Seoul into the forests of Jeju Island, to the home of her old friend Inseon. Hospitalized following an accident, Inseon has begged Kyungha to hasten there to feed her beloved pet bird, who will otherwise die. Kyungha takes the first plane to Jeju, but a snowstorm hits the island the moment she arrives, plunging her into a world of white. Beset by icy wind and snow squalls, she wonders if she will arrive in time to save the bird – or even survive the terrible cold which envelops her with every step. As night falls, she struggles her way to Inseon's house, unaware as yet of the descent into darkness which awaits her. There, the long-buried story of Inseon's family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in a painstakingly assembled archive documenting a terrible massacre on the island seventy years before. We Do Not Part is a hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination and above all an indictment against forgetting.