Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend's corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma. Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless.
Already a controversial bestseller and award-winning book in Korea, it confirms Han Kang as a writer of immense importance.
By the Korean writer who won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction in 2016 for The Vegetarian Han Kang.
