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Korean author Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, returns with We Do Not Part, her poetic, starkly beautiful fifth novel to be translated into English. Kyungha, the book’s narrator, wanders through a bewildering internal dreamscape, haunted by a recurring nightmare of graves inundated by rising water. She has lost or cut off most relationships, and spends her time alone, shedding her belongings and rewriting her will and final instructions. Then a texted summons brings her to the hospital bedside of her friend Inseon.

Kyungha has known Inseon for more than 20 years as a work colleague, friend and, now, artistic collaborator. Though their current joint project, inspired by Kyungha’s nightmare, has begun to lose Kyungha’s interest, Inseon had persevered, until she severed her fingers with a power saw while preparing sculptures for their installation. She asks Kyungha to travel from the hospital in Seoul to her home to save the life of her bird, Ama, left without food or water after her accident.

It is a near-impossible task. Inseon lives to the south, on Jeju island, where she had moved to care for her mother until her recent passing. Kyungha arrives on the island in blizzard conditions. She struggles to reach Inseon’s remote and isolated house, slipping and falling unconscious in the snow more than once, then somehow arriving in the cold, dark building to find both Ama and Inseon inside.

We Do Not Part moves to its own disorienting rhythms, and at this point in the narrative, a reader will likely be both spellbound and unsettled. We feel the chill and isolation of the snowbound island. We see the shadows of birds projected on the walls by candlelight. We read the dry, crumbling documents gathered by Inseon’s mother detailing horrors perpetrated not so long ago by the Korean government on Jeju’s people. We sense the love between Kyungha and Inseon, along with their deepening understanding of the steely perseverance of that older woman, who was, in life, seemingly quiet and subdued. 

For readers unfamiliar with the history, at least 30,000 people—10% of the island’s population—were massacred on Jeju between 1948 and 1949 by the U.S. Military Government in Korea and then by the South Korean Army under Syngman Rhee. Google Jeju and this fact is not among the top hits. Han, however, considers this history with fierce humanity. She writes beautifully, with profound moral authority. Of course she should have a Nobel Prize.

There are sound reasons that Adam Haslett’s debut short story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, and his second novel, Imagine Me Gone, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. With Mothers and Sons—a story about the self-inflicted pain of long-buried memories—he demonstrates once again his ability to produce graceful, emotionally affecting fiction whose characters’ struggles seem as real as those of people we know in our own lives.

At the center of Haslett’s novel are Peter Fischer, a New York City immigration lawyer who specializes in representing clients seeking asylum, and his mother, Ann, a former Episcopal priest who abandoned both the church and her husband 20 years earlier to establish a women’s retreat center—a “ministry of hospitality”—in Vermont with her romantic partner, Clare, and her friend Roberta. Peter and Ann’s relationship, even on its best day, is a cool one.

Peter’s stressful but predictable law practice mostly involves representing victims of political violence, and it’s upended when he takes on Vasel Marku, a 21-year-old man from Albania, as a client. Like Peter, Vasel is gay, and his asylum claim is based on his fear that he’ll be persecuted for his homosexuality if he returns to his homeland. As Peter struggles to persuade a reluctant Vasel to help him gather the evidence Vasel will need to secure a judge’s permission to remain in the United States, his client’s predicament surfaces Peter’s painful memories of his own attraction to a charismatic fellow high school student, Jared Hanlan, and its tragic end two decades earlier.

Deliberately, and with consummate skill, Haslett braids these stories until, in the final third of the novel, he reveals the devastating event that lies at the heart of the emotional gulf Ann and Peter must span. Though it anchors the book, theirs is not the only story of maternal love he explores, layering depth and complexity over an already rich novel and illuminating its plural title. Haslett’s prose is simultaneously efficient and evocative, so that the pleasures of this touching novel extend well beyond those that flow from engaging with a psychologically astute and well-told story. In his capable hands, Mothers and Sons is an exemplar of realist fiction.

Read our Q&A with Adam Haslett about Mothers and Sons.