Description "Solitude, stillness, and courage. These are what this book breathed into me, like air." An autobiographical novel by Han Kang, the first Korean author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature In October 2024, Han Kang was named the first Korean recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, honored "for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life." Her win also marked a historic moment as the first Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to an Asian woman, and only the eighteenth ever awarded to a woman writer. In an interview with the Nobel Committee after her win, Han Kang shared, "I would recommend The White Book — it's a very personal book with many autobiographical elements." The author carried within her the memory of an older sister she never knew, who passed away just two hours after birth, and of her young mother who gave birth to and lost her first daughter alone. "Unlike 'hayan,' which is pure and clean like cotton candy, 'huin' carries within it the quiet coexistence of life and death. What I wanted to write was a 'huin' — a white — book. I thought, one day as I walked, that this book should begin with the memory of my mother's first child" (from the Author's Note, p. 174). Beginning from that memory, the author wove a total of 65 stories into The White Book. Now, The White Book is being reissued in a new edition. To allow readers to focus purely on the work itself, the photographic images have been removed, and the book is wrapped in a new cover featuring the title embroidered on unbleached cloth. This design draws on the way thread connects, tangles, breaks, and unravels — much like the sentences the author weaves and the world they form together. Though spinning thread and composing sentences may seem like simple, linear acts, we wanted this design to capture how such acts can encompass everything from an intimate exploration of life, death, and human existence to a questioning of the meaning behind the countless events that unfold in this world. Publisher's Review Han Kang's novel The White Book is a book stitched together stitch by stitch, as though embroidered — a book stained with the very sweat of its making. Were it not for this occasion, would we ever have paused to explore, inside and out, all the "white things" that spring from this single word — huin? Staring intently at the single syllable 'huin,' one feels a thick, viscous sorrow rise up, like burnt rice water boiling over, drawn out from the shape and sound of the word itself. Where does this feeling — at once familiar and comforting, yet strange and unfamiliar — come from? Within this curious, subtle world of 'huin,' where one can neither claim to fully understand nor to be entirely ignorant, the narrative Han Kang draws forth is astonishingly vast and deep. Her uniquely sensitive and delicate perception yields insights that are as cold as ice and as searing as freshly ground bone ash. Do we not all come from white, and return to white in the end? The White Book — a novel Han Kang pressed firmly onto a blank white page. A novel that speaks of every other white thing in existence. The White Book is a story about a certain kind of white that can never be sullied, that can never be tainted. "The first thing I did, in the spring when I decided to write about white things, was make a list." The list of white things summoned forth by the author unfolds across three chapters: "I," "She," and "All Whiteness." Though it is a single novel, it can just as easily be read as a collection of 65 poems, for each story beneath its subtitle carries its own dense, complete beauty. Though relatively slim in volume, this novel resists being read quickly. It draws you into reading slowly, ever so slowly — pausing to trace a faint pencil line beneath a sentence or a word — then pulling you back to reread from where you began. The white things summoned to bear the ever-growing weight of The White Book, as something like a knot in the heart seeps into its pages, include: swaddling cloth, a baby's first clothes, the moon-shaped rice cake, fog, a white city, milk, a candle, frost, hoarfrost, sugar cubes, white stones, white bones, white hair, clouds, an incandescent bulb, the white night, the pale reverse side of thin paper, a white butterfly, rice and cooked rice, a burial shroud, mourning clothes, smoke, a baby tooth, snow, snowflakes, eternal snow, waves, sleet, and white.