Han Kang writes Korean literary fiction about violence, the body, memory and the difficulty of expressing trauma. The Vegetarian follows Yeong-hye after she stops eating meat and increasingly rejects the expectations placed on her body, with the story told through the perspectives of people around her rather than through a conventional first-person account. Human Acts is structured around the 1980 Gwangju uprising and follows victims, survivors and witnesses across different times. The White Book is a more fragmentary meditation on grief, birth and absence, organised through images of white objects. Han's prose is spare, unsettling and often structurally unusual, with silence and bodily experience carrying major narrative weight. The Vegetarian is the clearest entry for psychologically intense literary fiction, while Human Acts offers a more explicitly historical and collective treatment of state violence. Read more Less
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