Human Acts - Softcover

'Human Acts is an important novel, moving and heartbreaking in its dignity' -- Eileen Battersby, the Irish Times
'In simple, lyrical and visceral prose... Han presents a vivid account of both the power of collective spirit... and the capacity of brutal regimes to crush it to nothing' -- Luke Davies, the Literary Review
'Human Acts is a stunning piece of work. The language is poetic, immediate, and brutal. Han Kang has again proved herself to be a deft artist of storytelling and imagery' --Jess Richards

'A rare and astonishing book, sensitively translated by Deborah Smith, Human Acts enrages, impassions and most importantly, gives voices back to those who were silenced' -- Claire Hazelton, the Observer
'[About] the extremes of human behaviour, from selfless sacrifice to unbelievable wickedness' -- Kate Saunders, The Times
'With exquisitely controlled eloquence, this novel chronicles the tragedy of ordinariness violated' -- New Statesman
'A brave and profoundly affecting book... It is structurally ambitious and highly original in its use of narrative voice and its chronology' -- Robert Hawkins, the London Magazine
'A grim but heartfelt performance, touching on the possibility of forgiveness and the survival of the spirit' -- Sunday Times
'As subtle and specific as it is universally heartbreaking' --Arifa Akbar, Independent

'Neither inviting nor shying away from modern-day parallels, Han neatly unpacks the social and political catalysts behind the massacre and maps its lengthy, toxic fallout. [It] is remarkable... how she accomplishes this while still making it a novel of blood and bone. Han prepares us for one of the most important questions of our times: 'What is humanity? What do we have to do to keep humanity as one thing and not another?' She never answers, but this acts of unflinching witness seems as good a place to start as any' -- Eimear McBride, the Guardian
'A sobering meditation on what it means to be human' -- Francesca Wade, Financial Times
'By its very existence, Human Acts is an important and necessary book, but without Han Kang's astonishing penmanship, I doubt it would have been so devastating and vital a work of literature' -- Lucy Scholes, National
'A conversation of which we rarely hear both sides: the living talking to the dead, and the dead speaking back' -- Jonathan McAloon, Sunday Telegraph
'Reading Human Acts, I sometimes felt as though I were listening to a story someone had been waiting years to tell; at others, that I was eavesdropping on someone's deepest thoughts to which I should not be privy. The act of remembering is never easy for the characters in this work, but it is also something they cannot stop doing. Remembering brings back to life the terror these characters experienced, but also always seems hollow for it will never bring back the dead or undo the violence enacted on them. Yet even when characters actively try to refuse to remember, they find those traces of the past welling up within them. A sense of inevitability lingers throughout Human Acts: it is a story that must be told' -- Kalau Almony, Reading in Translation
'Full of pathos, the novel [follows] the guilt-ridden survivors who struggle to achieve normal lives while still facing the threat of torture, censorship and repression... Han's books testifies to a specific atrocity while raising universal questions about what it means to be human, with all the potential for tenderness and cruelty that entails... Writing with great formal control, Han switches easily from empathy and interiority to a more distanced, anthropological contemplation... Among Han's more impressive achievements is her ability to convey disintegration and alienation with such elegance. Her aesthetic strategies [...] suggest a profound humanism rather than any abstract design... In Human Acts, [Han] has created a moving testament to fiction's capacity to house even the most luminal and oppressed, to give a voice to the voiceless, whether living or dead' --Kate Webb, Times Literary Supplement

HAN KANG was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today's Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English, was published by Portobello Books in 2015. She currently teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.