The White Book

The White Book by Han Kang is unlike any of her other works — a meditation on whiteness, grief, and the possibility of consolation written in the form of a series of lyric fragments, each centred on a white object: snow, salt, a shroud, a blank page. The book was written in Warsaw, where Han Kang spent time on a residency, and it meditates on the city’s wartime destruction and rebuilding alongside the personal grief of losing a sister who died at birth before Han Kang herself was born. The white objects become vessels for this accumulated sorrow — things that are both absence and presence, erasure and survival. Published by Portobello Books, The White Book is formally unique and profoundly moving: a book that defies genre and exists in a space between poetry, essay, and novel.