Human Acts

Gwangju South Korea 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising a boy searches for his friends 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.