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The White Book feels as if it is being whispered: each paragraph seems to come from some deep and interior place Han Kang wrote it whilst living in Warsaw, though in the book the city is never named explicitly Instead it is only a white city, white for its snow and white for its stone ruins In an interview with Granta, Kang said that when writing this book, she imagined her prematurely dead sister had lived and visited the city ‘in my place’   Photographs are interspersed throughout In some, a woman appears, her face obscured by shadow In others, only her hands are visible She holds a child’s gown She holds a pebble-like object covered in salt The photographs are of white objects, but in contrast to the white pages, they are startlingly grey The specks and splashes of whiteness are surrounded by shadow The woman seems trapped in darkness Who is this woman supposed to represent? The narrator? The ghost of the sister? The novelist Kang? All or none of the above?  The literal answer is that they are photographs of a performance by Kang, shot by the photographer Choi Jinhyuk But within the pages, they seem to carry the spirit of characters — and the novelist herself   The text is a loose collection of thoughts, scenes, and images Few are longer than a page They are gathered into three sections — ‘I’, ‘She’, and ‘All Whiteness’ ‘I’ follows the narrator considering the colour white and describes her sister’s passing ‘She’ imagines the sister’s life Some subsections describe what the sister might have done—having an X-ray, finding a pebble, attempting to befriend a dog Others contemplate white things—seagulls, a dead butterfly, a lace curtain   Both ‘I’ and ‘She’ are pensive and slightly sorrowful At first, this similarity is disorienting: it is hard to see where one perspective ends and the other begins Slowly, the reader realises that this muddling is the point The concern of the narrator is not whether the sister would have been a vastly different person, but what it means to replace one life with another Her mother would not have

ESCAPE AT RED ROCKS   I am the colour of the outside, a stillness moving like a winter tide, a new shoreline in formation, a marshland waterlogged – soggy ground needs time to dry it out –   but time as sea wind not calendar, the time found inside spaces stretching out and over like skin on a drum is a resonance, a wave that submerges the entire rock, not chiseling or scratching at one area only, not just a mind to impress upon   but a flattened and silken self all bound into the support of the water, head rising up then down to find my breath     DIVINATION AT HIGH WATER   Small birds dip on the tide, one instant silver, next dark as shadow and, seep-into-it, disappear again in the glint of sun on the wave; and turning under into the crust of water, taking on edges and then reversing, then – flicker –   there is no need to carry a narrative high on my shoulders as the light makes me another story, touching distance huge as the earth’s arc,   no collapse of form or dissolution, but an alteration, a submission to the sky and then, for a moment, enlarged as wide as a firmament, my body, a long afternoon of rain, becomes thunder     PORTENT IN THE HIGH WOODS   The men sit before the hearth, spit words into flames Some thing is coming over the mountains, along forest tracks and past the stream   They know this as he saw it in a dream, heard horses’ hooves stick in sandy mud, saw in his sleep a shadow in the high wood, long-lined like a tree but swerving down the path like a torrent   He says this out loud Men lean inwards, look east across lead-lined windows, terraced gardens, sodden topiary to feathery fog, the flood   And in woods, at a fire-pit in the grove, twigs are laid on the centre-stone, a mist swirls then scatters as oaks creak and crack, cloudy droplets skulk like rainclouds over the earth   At their hearth, the men cackle, scramble for spears and swords Across mountains, in the estuary, the thick tide is far and out Lithe winds ride in over the valley One man licks his lips to taste the salt   *   In the grove, weary bodies rest on the sound of the mist, which crunches  now like the rock that