Human Acts

A riveting, poetic and unrelentingly powerful work from the author of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize-winning novel The Vegetarian.  "Han Kang's writing is clear and controlled and she handles the explosive, horrifying subject matter with great warmth" (The Times).

Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend's corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma. 

"Searing. In Human Acts [Kang] captures the paradox of being human: the meat-like, animal reduction of our humanity the dead bodies of the beginning chapter alongside our ability to love and suffer for our principles, and die for them, that makes us truly human. She is excellent in summarizing this paradox. If it hopes to tie the personal with the political, it does the former so much more powerfully: a mother thinking of her dead son, for example, displays literary mastery as subtle and specific as it is universally heartbreaking."  -  The Independent

Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless. It is a pointillist portrait of a historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity. Already a controversial bestseller and award-winning book in Korea, it confirms Han Kang as a writer of immense importance.