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We Do Not Part

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We Do Not Part

Written by: Han Kang, e. yaewon - translator, Paige Morris - translator
Narrated by: Greta Jung
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2024

Like a long winter’s dream, this haunting and visionary new novel from 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang takes us on a journey from contemporary South Korea into its painful history

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.

Translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris

‘One of the most profound and skilled writers working on the contemporary world stage’ Deborah Levy

‘A vital voice and a writer of extraordinary humanity. Her work is a gift to us all’ Max Porter

‘A remarkable novelist who reflects our modern condition with courage, imagination, and keen intelligence’ Min Jin Lee

© Han Kang 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 Editors Select Friendship Genre Fiction Historical Literary Fiction World Literature

Critic Reviews

[Han Kang’s] empathy for vulnerable, often female, lives is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose . . . She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in a poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose (Nobel Prize in Literature Committee)
A masterpiece . . . We Do Not Part is both act of witness and a beautiful poetic object . . . It is a rare privilege to read a masterpiece so recently crafted, to know that the new prose you are reading (too fast!) will endure. We Do Not Part is an astonishing book (Anne Enright)
Han Kang offers a devastating indictment of her country’s past . . . The novel conjures a dreamlike feel amid its potent tales of suffering and cruelty, all leading to a final section that is simply stunning. Han pulls off a masterful meditation on what it’s like to be assaulted by an “endless spew of blood-soaked memories”. In that finale, I was stopped short by the grace of one dazzling page, with its cascade of memorable images. These include a description of mental collapse as hundreds of fuses in one’s head blowing one by one, and a woman sleeping all day in a hospice, who reminds Khungha of “a sea where the high tide lasts forever”. Han ends her magnificent novel on a beautifully beguiling note
With patience and acute insight, [Han Kang] explores both the breadth and brutality of human cruelty, and the profound capacity of our species for tenderness . . . We Do Not Part strikes a match in the darkness, insists on the strength of sisterhood, and makes us believe that even the smallest of lives, the pulse of a bird’s heart, should matter
Han’s work – itself a radical form of outreach and connection, an attempt to feel into the painful lives of strangers – is highly original and moving. Although she refuses to look away from human cruelty, it is her glimmers of hope that are most affecting . . . There is, perhaps, no novelist working today who seems so devoted to interrogating the epistemic problem of suffering
One of the greatest living writers . . . She is a voice for women, for truth and, above all, for the power of what literature can be (Eimear McBride)
This might be Han’s best novel yet . . . The Korean 2024 Nobel laureate combines the strangeness of The Vegetarian and the political history in Human Acts to extraordinary effect in her latest novel.
A courageous and gifted writer whose work has truly global resonance . . . [Han Kang’s] writing is nuanced, supple and precise
Bold and revelatory, disquieting and subversive, Han’s style is both spare and lyrical
A chilling reminder of the terrible invisibility of people and events that are removed from us in space and time
All stars
Most relevant
I’ll be honest, the entirety of this story is still beyond me. I am lost and confused however I know I was living that life with the characters in that moment. I felt what she felt, saw what she did, felt the weight of the bird and the snow. The story was a lot to take in but the emotions definitely delivered

Vivid, surreal, sharp

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