We Do Not Part

We Do Not Part is Han Kang’s 2021 novel about friendship, memory, and the legacy of state violence on Jeju Island. The story follows Kyungha, a Seoul-based writer, who travels through a severe snowstorm to Jeju at the request of her injured friend Inseon, hoping to save Inseon’s pet bird. At Inseon’s isolated home, Kyungha encounters the deeply buried history of Inseon’s family and the devastating Jeju massacre of the late 1940s. Blending reality, dreams, archival fragments, and haunting imagery, the novel examines historical trauma and what it means to remember people whom official histories have tried to erase. Its focus is not only political violence but also enduring love, friendship, motherhood, mourning, imagination, and the moral refusal to forget. The English translation, by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, was published in 2025. The novel was originally published in Korean in 2021 and won the Prix Médicis étranger for its French translation in 2023.