The White Book

by ,

Hardcover, 160 pages

English language

Published Aug. 24, 2019 by Crown/Archetype.

ISBN:
978-0-525-57306-7
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OCLC Number:
1084730998

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(1 review)

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, Han Kang’s The White Book is a meditation on color, as well as an attempt to make sense of her older sister’s death, who died in her mother’s arms just a few hours after she was born.

In captivating, starkly beautiful language, The White Book is a letter from Kang to her sister, offering a multilayered exploration of color and its absence, and of the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit.

4 editions

reviewed The White Book by Han Kang

The White Book

In this novel, the narrator reflects on the death of her older sister, who died two hours after she was born. Their mother described the infant as "white as a crescent-moon cake." From that description, the narrator considers all the other ways that she has encountered the color white, and the emotions that they trigger in her about the sister that she never met. This capsule description doesn't do the novel justice, of course -- Kang thoroughly plumbs the emotional depths of the topic in moving and fascinating ways.

Subjects

  • Fiction, family life
  • Fiction, psychological
  • Korea, fiction