Description ■ The Days After the Parting At eighteen, they are torn apart by their families' hands, the events of that night left unspoken between them. Reliving the nightmarish moment they lost their loved ones all at once, each of them—with different temperaments and different mindsets—spends the days after in their own way. One carries the enormous question mark left behind by beloved family and can no longer believe in love; the other, unable to bear the thought of losing someone they love again, lives like a sinner, weighed down by guilt. At twenty-one, when time has passed and the two meet again by chance, Dodam and Haesol's wounds have still not healed. Miraculously reunited as lovers, their relationship seems to limp along, precarious and unsteady. Confused about whether this love stems from guilt or is genuine, they are haunted by the compulsion that this time they must be happy no matter what, in order to forget their past misfortune—yet whenever they look at each other's faces, that day in Jinpyeong comes rushing back, and they cannot bring themselves to meet each other's eyes. The novel portrays how Dodam and Haesol, who parted while carrying the same trauma and later met again, pass through the same wound in different ways, and how they choose to love each other once more. It is a shocking yet universal love story—tender, but never simply romantic—complex and deep, like water itself. ■ Until They Join Hands Again As time flows on, the love and truths they come to face are not singular, but flow like water at different speeds and in different directions. Yet living according to their own currents, Dodam and Haesol repeatedly feel the pull toward one another—longing, guilt, and love, again and again. The emotions that make up love are not one thing, and so the nature of love itself is perhaps not a single pure diamond, but closer to sedimentary rock, layered from many emotions accumulated over time. In this way, Rapids is a novel that suggests falling in love with someone may never take just one shape. In these pages appear those who awaken to love, who are betrayed by it, who believe in it, who doubt it, who fear falling in love, and who nonetheless try to love again. Like a surface that seems calm but suddenly turns deep and fierce with unexpected depth and speed, or like a flame you thought you could warm yourself by that suddenly blazes too hot to approach—how deeply can we experience the unpredictable nature of love? Reading the stories of those who bravely threw themselves into the depths of the water and the heart of the fire, and came back out, we may come to understand love just a little more.