Han Kang

News of our event with Han Kang has been met with profound excitement from our booksellers.

Our fiction buyer Matthew was able to get his hands on an pre-publication copy of Kang's Greek Lessons and has described it as a "potent reminder of why I love literary fiction, and also a profound confirmation of Han Kang's abilities and status as (in my opinion) one of the greatest writers alive."

Kang is, in his mind, "surely a future noble laureate. It is going to be difficult for any other book to unseat Greek Lessons as my favourite novel of 2023."

For those who haven't yet discovered her work, Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian and was shortlisted for The White Book, alongside her translator, Deborah Smith.

She joins us to discuss Greek Lessons, a powerful novel of the saving grace of language and human connection.

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight.

Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages.

Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish - the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity - their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to expression.

Greek Lessons is a tender love letter to human intimacy and connection, a novel to awaken the senses, vividly conjuring the essence of what it means to be alive.