In 2016, the South Korean novelist Han Kang won the International Booker Prize for The Vegetarian, the first of her novels to be translated into English. The novel, in which a woman who suddenly refuses to eat meat is treated as if she were mad, was read as a parable of the modern condition, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis or “A Hunger Artist,” updated for the age of feminism and ecopolitics. In October, with three more of her novels now available in English and at least 20 other languages, the Swedish Academy awarded Han the Nobel Prize, elevating her to the empyrean realm reserved for writers of what is sometimes called world literature.

Internationally famous authors need no pity, but the status comes with vulnerabilities. Having been turned into global ambassadors for their culture, they are often accused of becoming deracinated and defanged. Han has dodged the charge so far. But suspicion fell on the English-language translator of The Vegetarian, Deborah Smith, when the novel was propelled into the spotlight. Smith mistranslated some words, but her harsher detractors accused her of betraying Han’s limpid, understated style, torquing it so as to hold the attention of Western readers.

Works transposed into foreign languages—and cultures—inevitably suffer omissions and distortion. That doesn’t make them less authentic. But if you’re trying to understand what Han is up to, adjudicating the stylistic accuracy of the translation is less important than deepening your knowledge of the work’s context, which, like South Korea itself, is at once decidedly Korean and very cosmopolitan.

In The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century, Adam Kirsch argues that “globalism is not just a fate thrust upon writers, but a theme that writers see it as a duty and an opportunity to explore.” What makes a novel global is not that its author has become a worldwide brand, but that it originates in a consciousness of living and writing in a world with permeable borders, and a desire to make sense of that experience. By Kirsch’s definition, Han writes global novels. Most of them deal—some more obliquely than others—with South Korea’s bloody past as a pawn in great-power politics and the war against Communism.

Perhaps that sounds didactic; rest assured that her novels foreground richly specific narratives about individual characters. History still seeps in, and all the more so when the details have largely been forgotten or obscured. Memories of horrors that younger South Koreans can no longer name produce uncanny symptoms in their bodies and dreams. Han, who is also a poet, commands an impressive arsenal of literary devices, and in her hands, the national repression of trauma—what Milan Kundera called “organized forgetting”—even affects the weather. The pathetic fallacy hasn’t been put to such good use in fiction since Wuthering Heights.

Weather plays a major role in, and may in fact be the main character of, Han’s latest novel, We Do Not Part, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. Much of the action takes place during a massive blizzard, and the wind and precipitation and skies all have an eerie salience. The snow, though, is most saturated with meaning. It exhibits both agency and pathos, as if possessed by ghosts. Snow blocks the narrator’s way during an urgent journey. It effaces the features of people and landscapes the way amnesia erases memories, and yet it also awakens recollections, many of them unbearable, in those it falls upon. Snow clings desolately to eyelashes and noses. It even weeps, blowing into eyes and melting into tears.

We Do Not Part opens with a nightmare that torments the narrator, Kyungha, night after night, and always makes her wake up in a panic. She is standing before a plain containing vast numbers of ink-black lopped-off tree trunks. Suddenly the sea rises and starts to flood the plain. She knows, with the certainty of a dream, that the mutilated trees mark graves, and that she must stop the water, right now, from dredging up and desecrating the bones. But how?

Kyungha is a writer who published a book about a massacre that took place in a city referred to as G—. As it happens, Han wrote a novel Human Acts, about a pro-democracy movement led by students and activists in Gwangju in 1980 that was put down with extreme violence. Possibly as many as 2,000 protesters (the exact number is not known), most of them young and all deemed to be Communists, were murdered. The novel describes, among other barbaric acts, how soldiers and police threw bodies carelessly into trucks that carted them off to be hidden or burned. Kyungha’s research into G— has left her in a suicidal fugue. She has lost touch with friends; her husband has abandoned her and seems to have taken their daughter with him. Now she lives alone in a tiny rental apartment just outside Seoul, if endlessly rewriting her will and not eating or sleeping can be called living. She is as helpless in life as she is in the nightmare.

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Kyungha comes up with a project that she thinks will exorcize it. She will collaborate with a friend, Inseon, a documentary filmmaker, on an art film. The plan is to re-create the dream, setting up dozens of tree trunks on a large piece of land, and then wait for winter and shoot the snow falling over the trunks, “as white as cloth to drape down from the skies and blanket them all.” Han doesn’t interpret the dream or its remedy for us, but we understand that the trunks and bones are meant to stand in for the unburied dead of G—, and that the snow is to serve as their shroud.

Han’s novels vary in style, but they form an unusually interconnected whole—in an interview, a member of the Nobel Prize committee noted “a continuity as to themes that is quite remarkable”—and the color white is a motif in all of them. It is mostly associated with birth and death. Han’s brief, lyrical novel The White Book, about an older sister of the narrator who died a few hours after she was born, begins with a list of “white things,” each of which then becomes the subject of a short meditation. Included on the list are “shroud” and “snow,” as well as “white bird”; along with the enshrouding snow, white birds play a role in We Do Not Part.

The temptation to read the white things of this novel as metaphors or omens is hard to resist. They do function figuratively. Looking through the window of an airplane at an approaching blizzard, for instance, Kyungha mistakes the swirling snow for “tens of thousands of white-feathered birds flying right along the horizon.” They could be albatrosses hovering over the Ancient Mariner.

But the white things do more than symbolize. Like the snow, white birds participate in the action as full-fledged characters. Inseon, who lives alone on Jeju Island, off the coast of the Korean peninsula, is devoted to a pair of white budgerigars—a kind of parakeet—that are nominally pets, but really companions; they speak in words because that’s what parakeets do, but maybe there’s more to it than that. Kyungha is flying into a storm because Inseon, who has been evacuated to a mainland hospital after a horrible accident, has asked her to travel to her remote mountain home to rescue one of the budgies (the other died earlier). Kyungha is incredulous that she agreed to undertake such a dangerous expedition just to save a bird. As she transfers from the plane to a bus, from which she will transfer to another bus and then walk to Inseon’s house, the wind picks up and the snow falls ever more heavily.

Kyungha’s trip to Jeju Island turns out to be merely a frame narrative for a much more terrifying journey, which is into history: Inseon’s history is bound up with the history of the island, which in turn recapitulates the history of South Korea itself. Over the course of the novel, Inseon tells Kyungha how she pieced together a past that her mother had shielded her from. Han’s ability to drop references to momentous events offhandedly, as if they were part of everyday life, is on full display here. As an angry teenager who develops a passionate hatred for everything about her life, particularly her stooped, seemingly subservient mother, Inseon runs away to Seoul, falls through a snowbank into a pit, and nearly dies. When she wakes up in a hospital several days later, her mother is by her side. She had known that something had happened to Inseon, she tells her daughter, because she’d dreamed that she saw her with snow on her face.

A little later, Inseon explains why her mother would have had that dream: “When she was young, soldiers and police had murdered everyone in her village.” (Most of Inseon’s stories are in italics, at least in the translation.) Inseon’s mother and her older sister had been away visiting cousins in another village; when they came home, snow had fallen on the corpses heaped on the grounds of the elementary school, covering their faces, and the sisters couldn’t figure out which were the bodies of family members. So the older sister took out her handkerchief and told Inseon’s mother that she’d wipe the faces, and “you get a good look at them.” And that, Inseon says, is how her mother, as a child, learned that when people died, “snow remained on their cheeks, and a thin layer of bloody ice set over their faces.”

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As Inseon follows clues left by her mother, whom she cared for during the last years of her life, We Do Not Part turns into a mystery and a ghost story. It’s a mystery because what happened on Jeju Island—in reality, not just in this novel—is not well known in South Korea, any more than it was to Inseon: In the run-up to the Korean War, the authorities suppressed an uprising there with shocking brutality, in the name of anti-Communism. Historians still aren’t sure whether the death toll was 30,000 or upwards of 80,000, out of a population of about 300,000—far more deadly than the outcome in Gwangju. For half a century afterward, well into the 1990s, few people talked about the slaughter on Jeju Island or dared to search for the dead and missing, because to do so was a crime punishable by torture and imprisonment. In the novel, Inseon learns that her quiet mother had, over the course of decades and in the face of real danger, been active in the movement to recover the remains, inspired by the disappearance of her brother, whom Inseon had never even heard of.

The novel is also a ghost story because hauntings are involved, both the usual kind and others that are the product of Han’s singular imagination. Once Kyungha makes it to Inseon’s home, the place turns out to be suspended between life and death. Neither Kyungha nor the reader is sure whether she is being visited by the revenants of the house’s previous occupants or has already joined them in the afterlife. Outside the house, the wind howls and the snow falls and, having fallen, muffles all sound, and we grasp that the elements are animated by the restless spirits of the tens of thousands who were never accounted for or given a proper burial.

Beyond that, a very large specter broods, palpable even though it never quite comes into view. You could call it the ghost of global history. The proximate cause of the war crimes chronicled in Han’s novels is South Korea’s succession of authoritarian governments, their soldiers and police; on Jeju Island, these were joined by gangs of right-wing thugs. But some of us in the West may have forgotten who the occupying power was at the time, and those who have not forgotten may never have known the extent to which it propped up those regimes and participated in anti-Communist counterinsurgency campaigns—including on Jeju Island. I knew very little of this history when I began to read Han’s novels, nor was I aware that during the Vietnam War, the same foreign government used more than 300,000 Korean troops, essentially as mercenaries, among them soldiers later accused of committing atrocities against Vietnamese civilians. Some Korean veterans of that war were also involved in suppressing uprisings such as the one in Gwangju. These discoveries came as a shock, because the occupier I’m talking about is, of course, the United States.

With her characteristically light touch, Han alludes to American culpability only in passing. In The Vegetarian, we learn that the protagonist’s abusive father earned a medal for his service in Vietnam, but the significance of that fact is not explained. In Human Acts, a character recounts a story about Korean soldiers burning Vietnamese villagers alive and adds, “Some of those who came to slaughter us did so with the memory of those previous times.” A line in We Do Not Part informs us that American military planes released propaganda leaflets over Jeju Island promising amnesty to rebels who turned themselves in; they were arrested anyway.

People in one country often fail to realize how implicated they are in the personal histories of people in countries halfway around the world. Han’s novels never make direct accusations, but her very tact makes the implied indictment all the more devastating. She draws American readers into foreign calamities that their own forebears had a hand in creating, and then offers a very limited kind of redemption—the chance to discover, for themselves, that legacy of shame. Better yet, we do so from the edges of the drama, not the center, where so many American movies about interventions in places like Vietnam seem determined to put us. Globalization is responsible for many bad things, but as Han demonstrates, the global novel is not one of them.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “Where Han Kang’s Nightmares Come From.”

The new year has begun, bringing with it the socially sanctioned push to make resolutions. Readers, or those who want to devote more time to reading, tend to set some quantifiable intentions for the year to come. A popular one is finishing an arbitrary number of books; another approach is to establish specific parameters—reading only titles by women for a year, meeting a quota for books in translation, or trying one work from every country. Some readers opt for one or two giant books that are notoriously demanding.

There’s nothing wrong with these aspirations, but personally, I’m a bit allergic to this kind of goal setting. I don’t like hemming myself in with strict rules—and I don’t want to let my inner perfectionist force me to continue a challenge long after I’ve stopped enjoying it. More important, strict directives prioritize box-checking over holistic growth. There are many ways to advance your skill and capacity as a reader: Some of us are naturally drawn to detailed nonfiction, and others must learn to love it; some may have a taste for meandering, multigenerational epics, while their friends must train to build up the attention span they need. Depending on your particular strengths and desires for change, a single book may offer a better workout than a dozen others combined. Each of the five books below exercises a different kind of reading muscle, so that you can choose the one that will push you most.

Dawn, by Octavia Butler

Butler’s best-known book is probably 1993’s Parable of the Sower, which takes place in an imagined 2024 uncannily like our own. But in 2025, consider picking up the science-fiction matriarch’s Xenogenesis series instead, starting with Dawn. The novel revolves around Lilith lyapo, a woman still mourning the death of her husband and child in a car accident when the world collapses during a nuclear war. At the book’s start, she wakes up and finds herself alone in a locked cell. Where is she, and who are her captors? The shocking truth: 250 years have passed since the war, which left Earth uninhabitable—and she’s one of the few humans left in the universe. She’s been preserved by the Oankali, an alien species so different from us in their senses, family systems, and even genders that she has a hard time making herself look at them at first. Like Lilith, readers are thrust into a foreign environment in which technology is as alive as fungi. In her uniquely straightforward style, Butler asks you to abandon preconceived ideas of what sentient life looks like and what survival really means. Once that perspective shift occurs, though, Butler’s universe—and the questions she’s raising—free you to imagine whole new ways of being.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa

García Márquez’s 1967 novel is a beautiful, surreal saga following the Buendía family and the town they founded, Macondo, over the course of a century. During those years, Macondo—which begins as a solitary retreat in the middle of nowhere—is invaded more and more by the concerns of the outside world: technology, warfare, colonialism. The novel’s huge cast of characters typically remain in their community, but all have distinct trajectories, many of which lead to their own versions of loneliness, tragic or ecstatic. One Hundred Years of Solitude can be a difficult read: Character names are repeated across generations; magic blurs into reality. Then there is García Márquez’s style, packed with pages-long paragraphs and lengthy sentences whose cadences take you on surprising journeys. Perhaps its most distinguishing quirk is its paucity of dialogue or of scenes as we recognize them; the adage “Show, don’t tell” is upended. Yet the long sections summarizing various events or expounding on capitalism, naive idealism, and violence turn out to be as engaging as any page-turner for the reader with the persistence to soldier on.

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The Piano Teacher, by Elfriede Jelinek, translated by Joachim Neugroschel

The Austrian Nobel Laureate Jelinek’s 1983 novel, her sixth—yet the first to be translated into English—is a deeply uncomfortable read. Immediately, it confronts readers with a strange style that telescopes chronology and memory, moving among its main character’s thoughts and associations without fanfare. This takes some getting used to, but once you’ve fallen into its rhythm, events move swiftly and even pleasurably (which is not to say pleasantly, given the subject matter). Erika, the titular piano teacher, is an unmarried woman in her late 30s who lives in Vienna with her abusive and overbearing mother; violent altercations between the two aren’t rare. Her outlook is bleak: Erika is in many ways shut down, imprisoned by her mother’s expectations and trapped in a static nation that had yet to face its role in World War II. When one of Erika’s students begins making romantic overtures, she rebuffs him, but he keeps at it. By the time she finally agrees to become involved with him, he is unprepared for the depth and depravity of her desires, honed over years of voyeurism in porn theaters and peep shows. The Piano Teacher asks you (and teaches you) to stick with disturbing moments and unpleasant characters. In return, it offers a journey through oddly beautiful prose and a powerful examination of shame.

Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was the first adult classic I tried to read. At 12, I loved its righteous protagonist, but the context of 19th-century Britain, powered by plunder from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, went over my head. Later, I learned to see the role that empire plays in the narrative: The madwoman haunting Jane and her beloved, Mr. Rochester, his Creole first wife, Bertha Mason, is shut up in the attic and compared to an animal. Cast aside in the original novel, she animates Rhys’s 1966 response: In Wide Sargasso Sea, Bertha is imagined as a girl originally named Antoinette, raised in Jamaica on a fallow sugar plantation after the abolition of British slavery. Rhys was British but born and raised in colonial Dominica, and she used her knowledge of the Caribbean and its dynamics to fill in the details of her main character’s life, defined by tensions between the planter class to which Antoinette belongs and their formerly enslaved neighbors. The prose jumps among narrators and flows dreamily from one moment to another, detailing how Mr. Rochester uses Antoinette’s Creole heritage and her family history of mental illness against her. Rhys’s project deals with Jane Eyre specifically, but her intervention asks us to consider other great literature in its historical and political context as well.

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The Vegetarian, by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith

On the surface, The Vegetarian is a work of realism with a simple premise. Yet something in the book is profoundly destabilizing, turning it into a wonderfully vertiginous read. When it opens, we meet Mr. Cheong, whose wife, Yeong-hye, has always been absolutely normal—rather quiet, a good cook, competent at her part-time graphic-design job, and deferential enough to her husband. But one night, a dream sparks dramatic change: She stops eating meat and using animal products, refusing to even keep them in the home. This seemingly small, personal decision triggers absolute indignation in her husband, parents, and siblings. There is much pain in The Vegetarian—the weight of guilt, the desire to self-destruct, the longing to change everything about yourself, the presence of despicable characters—and the plot’s unpredictable trajectory can make for a challenging read. That discomfort is precisely what Han is digging into in this marvelous and worthy book. But there is beauty, too, sitting right alongside the ugliness, waiting to reward the reader who can handle its leaps.