Kyungha, a woman living in contemporary Seoul, is burdened by the emotional toll of her past. Deeply empathetic, Kyungha experiences panic attacks and symptoms of anxiety and depression stemming from a harrowing book she wrote about a massacre in a South Korean city. When her friend Inseon suffers an accident, she asks Kyungha to travel to Jeju, an island of Korea’s south coast, to feed her pet bird which will die soon if not tended to. Arriving on Jeju in the midst of a massive blizzard, Kyungha races against the elements to reach the bird, but finds herself in a figurative space where dreams, nightmares and memories collide. phenomena in celebrity practices, cultures, politics, fandom, and economies.

Nobel laureate Han Kang’s fiction is deeply shaped by Korea’s troubled 20th-century history, and We Do Not Part is no exception. Having narrowly avoided personal entanglement in the 1980 Gwangju Uprising—her family left the city just months before the massacre—Han was deeply affected by hidden, unofficial accounts of this violence. Her childhood discovery of a clandestinely published photobook documenting Gwangju left her traumatized, and she channelled that experience into her earlier novel Human Acts.

In We Do Not Part, Kyungha’s book on a massacre takes place in a city referred to in the text as G______, which would seem to be an open invitation to interpret this as Gwangju. Inseon too, is preoccupied with such violent historical events: she’s a filmmaker whose documentary explores the violence committed by South Korean soldiers during the Vietnam War.

With trauma and state-sanctioned violence very much on Kyungha’s mind, visiting Jeju means that she will confront another painful episode in twentieth century South Korean history: the 1948 Jeju Uprising, when left-wing activists clashed with colonial-era collaborators, leading to a brutal government crackdown in which entire villages were massacred. Inseon’s family were embroiled in this violence, and as the novel progresses we are increasingly taken out of the realm of realism and into a more dreamlike space—is the bird dead, or alive? Is Inseon there with Kyungha or are these memories or even imagined conversations?

In Han’s hands, the blizzard and snow-covered landscape aren’t a realist setting, they are Romantic and elemental—she uses imagery of snow to both isolate and purify, the blizzard blotting out any distractions and allowing Kyungha to focus on the essentials: reaching the bird and by extension her whole friendship with Inseon. This device recalls her earlier work The White Book, where whiteness also carries a spiritual intensity and an emotional weight.

The English version of the novel uses italicized text to differentiate Inseon’s voice. These sections offer us Inseon’s voice and point of view, into Inseon’s own traumatic family history. Han’s depiction of psychological suffering, of migraines, insomnia, and nightmare, has a raw immediacy that suggests lived experience. Her depiction of the Jeju repressions is detailed and unflinching—and seems to be meticulously researched—grounding the novel’s more abstract elements in historical truth.

However, this is a novel about artists experiencing the pain of South Korean history at a distance—Inseon has a strong family connection to the brutality of the Jeju uprising, but both women live a life of relative material comfort in Seoul and seem able to pursue their creative projects unhindered. Material comforts aren’t everything, of course, and Kyungha and Inseon are not morbidly obsessed with trauma, they have deep empathy for the victims of the tragedies that they study. Perhaps more seriously though, some may find Han’s use of a tiny bird as a symbol of hope a little too on the nose.

A less abstract but nonetheless powerful narrative about Korea’s traumatic authoritarian past was offered by Crystal Hana Kim’s The Stone Home, a novel which also touches on the effects of generational trauma, a subject that is very much on Han’s mind in this novel. Though at times We Do Not Part’s layers of remove create distance rather than identification with the horrors that occurred on Jeju, it’s hard to doubt Han’s sincerity, which is expressed most clearly through Kyungha’s desperation and determination to reach the bird in time.

We Do Not Part is both a major work as well as an ideal starting point for newcomers interested in Han’s writing. It is also essential reading for anyone interested in confronting South Korea’s often violent and often repressed history.

John A Riley is a writer and former university lecturer based in Newcastle, UK.