Collected's TWELVE BOOKS OF CHRISTMAS 2025 | We Do Not Part - Han Kang

COLLECTED LOVES... Centred on a beautiful, enduring friendship and exploring the legacy of a series of civilian massacres prior to the Korean War, We Do Not Part is a frankly astounding book. Human frailty and resilience, the vital creative act, nightmares, snowfall and wooded landscapes are woven and layered throughout an incredibly deft, poetic prose, resulitng in a book that is both exquistite in its surrealism and essential in its telling of the past.

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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