The Vegetarian: A Novel (Chaesikjuuija)

This book was originally published in Korean as three separate novelettes & then compiled into a novel,  ‘Chaesikjuuija’, published in 2007 by Changbi Publishers,

Fraught, disturbing, & beautiful, Han Kang’s novel about is about shame & desire, & our faltering attempts to understand the lives of others. 

Translated by Deborah Smith.

Yeong-hye & her husband are ordinary people living in modern day South Korea. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. But then Yeong-hye, seeking a more ‘plant-like’ existence, commits a shocking act of subversion. As her rebellion manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, Yeong-hye spirals further and further into her fantasies of abandoning her fleshly prison and becoming - impossibly, ecstatically - a tree.

"...there is no end to the horrors that rattle in and out of this ferocious, magnificently death-affirming novel ... Han’s glorious treatments of agency, personal choice, submission & subversion find form in the parable." — Porochista Khakpopur, The New York Times Book Review

"This is Han Kang’s first novel to appear in English, & it’s a bracing, visceral, system-shocking addition to the Anglophone reader’s diet. It is sensual, provocative and violent, ripe with potent images, startling colours and disturbing questions ... The Vegetarian is an extraordinary experience."  — Daniel Hahn, The Guardian

Han Kang is a South Korean writer. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University & her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today’s Young Artist Award, & the Korean Literature Novel Award. She is also the author of Human Acts & The White Book. The Vegetarian is her first novel to be translated into English.