Human Acts

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.

‘With exquisitely controlled eloquence, the novel chronicles the tragedy of ordinariness violated in the echo chambers of Han’s haunting prose, precisely and poetically rendered by Smith, the sound of that heartbeat resonates with defiant humanity’ — New Statesman

‘A technical and emotional triumph… A conversation of which we rarely hear both sides: the living talking to the dead, and the dead speaking back’ — Sunday Telegraph (5 star review)