We Do Not Part bears witness to Jeju's painful past

To most of the world, the island of Jeju in South Korea is a holiday destination, with its idyllic beaches and majestic mountains that have formed the backdrop for many a Korean drama.

- Olivia Ho

This is not the Jeju of South Korean author Han Kang's new novel. In these pages, the island is a harsh snow-swept landscape, beneath which are buried countless bones.

We Do Not Part is Han's first novel to come out in an English translation after she became the first Asian woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.

This novel follows in the vein of Human Acts (2014, translated by Deborah Smith in 2016), about the Gwangju uprising of 1980 and its brutal suppression. Han again reckons with the agony of awareness of the horrific acts humans are capable of committing against one another, and the ethics of literature as an act of witnessing.

We Do Not Part is narrated by Kyungha, an author who, like Han, wrote a book about a massacre in her home town, G-. This has left her in such a state of anguish that she can barely go about her daily life and her loved ones have abandoned her.

In this limbo, she receives a call from an old friend, Inseon, a former photographer and documentary film-maker who gave up her art to pursue carpentry.