The white book

ISBN: 9781846276293 (hc)
Physical Description: print regular print 161 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm
Publisher: [London] : Portobello Books, 2017.
Copyright: &copy;2017

Han, Kang 1970- (author.). Smith, Deborah, 1987- (translator.).

Summary: Written while on a writer's residency in Warsaw, a city palpably scarred by the violence of the past, the narrator finds herself haunted by the story of her older sister, who died a mere two hours after birth. A fragmented exploration of white things -- the swaddling bands that were also her shroud, the breast milk she did not live to drink, the blank page on which the narrator herself attempts to reconstruct the story -- unfold in a powerfully poetic distillation. As she walks the unfamiliar, snow-streaked streets, lined by buildings formerly obliterated in the Second World War, their identities blur and overlap as the narrator wonders, 'Can I give this life to you?'. The White Book is a meditation on a colour, on the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.