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For years, a dream of graves by the sea has haunted Gyeongha. Snow covers bare, black tree trunks. The water rises and threatens to scatter the bones. Gyeongha has chosen to live apart from others. Then her friend Inseon sends her a message. Inseon is in hospital and asks her to visit Jeju Island. She needs Gyeongha to save her parrot.

This task draws Gyeongha into the past of a massacre. In the late 1940s, the killings took thirty thousand civilian lives. Many others faced prison and torture. Inseon’s mother suffered, and that past still shapes both friends’ lives.

Han Kang’s novel looks at friendship and the power to imagine. It shows how the past holds sway over the present. Her prose has the feel of poetry. It brings dreams and waking life close together. It blurs the line between what people see and what stays hidden. The story links the wounds of the past with how frail human life is.

Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024. This novel won South Korea’s Daesan and Kim Man-jung prizes in 2022. In France, it won the Prix Médicis Étranger in 2023. It then won the Prix Émile Guimet de Littérature Asiatique in 2024. Diana Yuksel translated this edition from Korean. It forms part of the Raftul Denisei series.