Han Kang is an extraordinary writer, now recognised with the award of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature (the first for a South Korean author). I want to cheat here, and recommend two of her books, short as they are. The White Book is filled with space, and flows with the growing subsong of emotion and feeling. The story builds, and gently holds your heart.
Jump over, too, to Greek Lessons, where the lives intersect of a woman no longer able to speak, since her son was taken away, and a teacher of ancient Greek losing his sight. Wondrous writing in both books.
FROM HAN KANG, WINNER OF THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
“[Han Kang writes in] intense poetic prose that . . . exposes the fragility of human life.”—from the Nobel Prize citation
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • A “formally daring, emotionally devastating, and deeply political” (The New York Times Book Review) exploration of personal grief through the prism of the color white, from the internationally bestselling author of The Vegetarian
“Stunningly beautiful writing . . . delicate and gorgeous . . . one of the smartest reflections on what it means to remember those we’ve lost.”—NPR
My friend, the author, stood to be President. He didn't get in. But he was instead asked to write an elegy for a glacier,the first to disappear in Iceland. It gleamed white as marble, now the cone volcano is only ash and lava. Andri wrote, "How do you say goodbye to a glacier?" Words now fail us, and this in a country with a famed body of sagas written 1000 years ago.
This is a gorgeous book about large and long time, and our small lives, about agency and creating new mythologies. We may find stories where the "ever after" could indeed be happy.
A few years ago, Andri Snaer Magnason, one of Iceland’s most beloved writers and public intellectuals, was asked by a leading climate scientist why he wasn’t writing about the greatest crisis mankind has faced. Magnason demurred: he wasn’t a specialist, he said; it wasn’t his field. But the scientist persisted: “If you cannot understand our scientific findings and present them in an emotional, psychological, poetic or mythological context,” he told him, “then no one will really understand the issue, and the world will end.”
Based on interviews and advice from leading glacial, ocean, climate, and geographical scientists, and interwoven with…
Set in the time of great transformation, from one type of political system to another, this is the first in the excellent Inspector Chen series. Likeable characterse, shadowy high-ups in the administrations, a simple crime that unravels lives. An insight into Shanghai of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which could be, of course, about people and their hopes almost anywhere.
Qiu Xiaolong's Anthony Award-winning debut introduces Inspector Chen of the Shanghai Police.
A young “national model worker,” renowned for her adherence to the principles of the Communist Party, turns up dead in a Shanghai canal. As Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Special Cases Bureau struggles to trace the hidden threads of her past, he finds himself challenging the very political forces that have guided his life since birth. Chen must tiptoe around his superiors if he wants to get to the bottom of this crime, and risk his career—perhaps even his life—to see justice done.
There are shadows on this shining sea. Fish cities have shrunk to hamlets, old ports have been levelled and harbours are full of warming water yet there’s barely a single ship. The climate crisis has come. Ice and glaciers are melting .
A burnished trawler skipper from the east coast of England said, “You know, we were more tolerant and kind in those days, when we sailed across the sea and brought home gifts and stories.”
Sea Sagas of the North is about the tales and sagas of heroic crossings in the waters of the North Sea and North Atlantic, circling clockwise from Iceland to Norway, Denmark, east and north England, to the Atlantic isles of Shetland, St Kilda and the Faroes, closing back at the melting ice and fire of Iceland.
I visited 160 ports, seaside settlements and islands facing and edging the North Sea and North Atlantic. I travelled on Viking longship, oyster smack and spritsail barge, lifeboat and post boat, iron ferry and wooden ferry, trawler and whaler, rowed and motored painter; and visited trawler and ship museum, whaling station, shipyard and dock. And then wrote stories about the people of these coasts and isles, as they created identity and meaning for living.
Sea Sagas of the North weaves prose chapters and alliterative sagas. This is the territory of sagas, the Norse and Anglo-Saxon gods of old, the mythic era of Viking expansion by clinkered longships, when dragons protected people from themselves by hiding golden hoards.
