The White Book

Hang Kan investigates the fragility, beauty & strangeness of life in a contemplation of memory, loss & the lives that leave this world before us.

Translated by Deborah Smith.

An unnamed narrator moves to a European city where she is haunted by the story of her older sister, who died a mere two hours after birth. As she contemplates the child’s short life she focuses on whiteness & all it symbolises. The White Book is a meditation on colour, beginning with a list of white things. It is a book about mourning, rebirth & the tenacity of the human spirit.

"An astonishingly rendered work of fiction, as much a meditation as a narrative ... Precise, subversive, fierce & deceptively opaque ... There is a heaviness in these pages, teamed with wonder; a fragile coexistence from sentence to sentence ... is not without hope. In its own way the novel is a sublime expression of grief’s incongruous byways, its busy inactivity, its larger, more elaborate intrusions."  — Catherine Taylor, Financial TImes

Han Kang is a South Korean writer. based in Seoul. The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English, won the 2016 Booker International Prize. Born in Gwangju, Han Kang moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today’s Young Artist Award, & the Korean Literature Novel Award. She is also the author of Human Acts. 

Deborah Smith’s literary translations from the Korean include two novels by Han Kang (The Vegetarian & Human Acts), & two by Bae Suah (A Greater Music & Recitation). She also recently founded Tilted Axis Press to bring more works from Africa, Asia, & the Middle East into English.