The White Book

While on a writer’s residency, a nameless narrator wanders the twin white worlds of the blank page and snowy Warsaw. The White Book becomes a meditation on the color white, as well as a fictional journey inspired by an older sister who died in her mother’s arms, a few hours old. The narrator grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, an event she colors in stark whitebreast milk, swaddling bands, the baby’s rice-cake-colored skinand, from there, visits all that glows in her memory: from a white dog to sugar cubes. As the writer reckons with the enormity of her sister’s death, Han Kang’s trademark frank and chilling prose is softened by retrospection, introspection, and a deep sense of resilience and love. The White Bookultimately a letter from Kang to her sisteroffers powerful philosophy and personal psychology on the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit and our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.