We Do Not Part

A Novel

De: Han Kang, E. Yaewon - translator, Paige Aniyah Morris - translator

Narrado por: Greta Jung

THE NEW NOVEL FROM HAN KANG, WINNER OF THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

“[Han Kang’s] intense poetic prose . . . confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”—The Nobel Committee for Literature, in the citation for the Nobel Prize

“Unforgettable.”—Hernan Diaz

Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter in Korean history.

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.

©2025 Han Kang (P)2025 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“A visionary novel about history, trauma, art and its tremendous costs. Han Kang is one of the most powerfully gifted writers in the world. With each work, she transforms her readers, and rewrites the possibilities of the novel as a form.”—Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies

“A disquietingly beautiful novel about the impossibility of waking up from the nightmare of history. Hang Kang’s prose, as delicate as footprints in the snow or a palimpsest of shadows, conjures up the specters haunting a nation, a family, a friendship. Unforgettable.”—Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Trust

"Haunting and dreamlike, this is a novel of secrets and silences.”—Silvia Moreno-Garcia, bestselling author of Mexican Gothic and The Seventh Seal of Salome

Powerful, Tough Listen

To truly understand the depth of this novel, I believe it will take several readings. Han Kang is a masterful, complex, sometimes confusing storyteller. We Do Not Part, like Human Acts, is a documenting of atrocities that took place in Korean history. It is masterfully set up almost as a dream like ghost story, when a close friend calls on the MC to save her bird after being hospitalized. She has severed her fingers and her beloved Budgie will not survive without care. There is a palatable tension throughout the MC’s journey to get to the island in a snowstorm. From there research papers are found on the massacre that took place.

I will not give anymore details away as I feel it is best to read them within the novel. This is a tough read. The MC is suffering with suicide ideations/depression and the atrocities that have taken place within her country. It does not shy away from the descriptive truth of the massacre, including the killing of children but there is also a masterful lightness to her sentences and comparisons to birds, snow, black logs, matches slowing burning out, trees that look human, etc. that makes it all digestible.

We do not part from remembering the people or what happened to them after reading this beautiful novel. And you will sadly question humanity and the evil humans are capable of.